5 Tips for Archiving Paper and Digital Photos

They are scattered in boxes, on phones, on the cloud, and on the refrigerator. We are, of course, talking about your memories. If you are in the midst of year-end cleaning and trying to wrap your head around how to combine both print and digital pictures, we have five tips for archiving paper and digital photos.

Paper Prints

1. Gather All the Photos

Polaroids, 8x10s, 4x6s, the size doesn’t matter just start to round them all up. There are a few ways you can go about organizing them. First, you can organize the photos by year or if there are just too many then organize by life’s milestones. Once arranged, you can now start to dig in.  Just like your camera roll, there is no need to keep all the photographs. Get rid of the ones that are out of focus, way too dark or have no special meaning.

2.User a Scanner App 

Download an app to scan the tangible photographs. For example, the free app PhotoScan is available for both iOS and Android. It’s pretty simple to use. Why is this app different than others? For starters, you’re not just taking a picture of a picture. It asks you to take four snaps of your image and stitches them together for the best photo possible. The best part? It only takes seconds.   The app has four features that include:

• Glare reduction
• Automatic edge detection
• Smart rotation
• Perspective correction

3. Upload to One Location

Then with one tap of the app to Google Photos, you can save and cherish those photos. You can also save it to some other cloud sites that you prefer like amazon prime and icloud.
Digital Photos

4.  Canvas the Devices

Just like the paper photos, scour every device that might hold a picture and put them into one place. Check your phones, flash drives, computers, laptops and drag those files into folders into one location. Once they are in one area, just like paper photos organize them by year or by life’s milestones.

5. Back it Up Again and Again and Again

Once you have everything nice and organized, go ahead and upload them to an online storage gallery. Then back them up on hard drives. If possible keep one of those hard drives off-site from your home. Do a yearly cleaning to keep the files from dragging down your space on your computers and phones.  The perfect way to back up both digital and tangible pictures is to print them. Photo books, collages, prints, metal it doesn’t matter. The main thing is you print what you love, and you love what you print. Check out our site HERE for more ways to print your memories.