Finally organize those family photos

Spending more time at home has offered the opportunity to tackle all sorts of ambitious projects, from DIY focaccia to workspace upgrades. Yet there’s one task that still seems impossible: organizing hundreds, if not thousands — or even hundreds of thousands — of print and digital photographs. The idea of sorting through them feels daunting, so instead you do nothing. The shots pile up; the cycle continues.

Yet with so many hours inside and a yearning, perhaps, to see friends and family, there’s no better moment than this one to break the inertia.

“The more that our photos are visible and accessible to us, the more likely it is that we’ll remember why we love the people in our lives,” said Eric

Niloff, a co- founder and the chief executive of EverPresent, a Boston- based company that digitizes and organizes family pictures.

Whether you have hundreds of gigabytes amassed from six device upgrades — EverPresent’s average iPhone client has between 15,000 and 20,000 digital photos, Niloff said — or boxes of decades- old albums, here are some simple ways to catalog and organize your images.

“Sitting down and saying, ‘ I am going to perfectly organize 50 years of slides and photo albums and 10 years of digital photos across eight devices’ is not a prescription for success,” Niloff said.

Instead, he suggested setting specific parameters ( say, two years’ worth of photos or two hours of your time each week) and building momentum from there. Gather everything in one place — a floor for prints, or a computer ( the best place to keep a working master archive) for digital images. Physical piles of “yes,” “no” and “maybe” work on the floor; digital images can be starred ( or “hearted”

Loose photos need a bit more love. If, after sorting, you’re left with a manageable quantity, transfer natural groupings into albums or archival boxes and note whatever best unites them, be it the year or the people featured.

If you’d rather keep the full archive on a computer — digital images are easier to turn into gifts and share with others —

you’ll need a good- quality scanner and lots of time and patience. Or you can find digitization services on the internet.

< strong> Tag and file digital photos.

Most photo apps allow users to input custom keywords, which can later be used to search for specific images. Niloff recommends starting with basic categories like people, pets, hobbies and holidays.

“The difference between 3,000 unlabeled photos versus 300 photos organized by category can be the difference between your child learning their history or not,” he said.

Folders (“Holiday Card 2020,” “Prints for Grandma”) make it easy to prep potential photos for a project and allow others ( like children) to browse images on your device. Just remem

Once your master archive is under control, it’s important to maintain it. Niloff suggests setting aside regular intervals — five minutes a week, the last Sunday of every month — to go through new images and ax the “no’s.”

“There’s a psychological fear of deleting,” Nelson said. “But by never deleting, the likelihood of you ever looking for the photos again is actually going to decrease.”

What should you do with the new batch of yeses and maybes? That varies depending on your specific setup. One tactic, said Niloff, is to upload them to the computer and back them up on an external hard drive or a cloud- storage service. Delete the maybe’s from the computer, leaving only your favorites left to tag and file. It’s as if you’re playing bouncer to your master archive — nothing that doesn’t pass muster is allowed inside.

After that, anything goes, but the experts encourage sharing some photos somewhere, whether organized in a stylish photo book, printed on reliable 4x6 glossies, used in hip holiday cards or even appearing in a regularly updated Instagram feed.

“If you are in a constant state of organizing but there’s no output — nothing in a photo book, nothing on social media, you’re in an ‘ analysis paralysis,’” Niloff said. “Text three photos to a friend, turn it into a slides how with Taylor Swift music: Whatever makes you connect with people.”