Transcript

When my parents moved to a smaller flat, I offered to sort the family photographs. I imagined a few albums and perhaps one shoe box. Instead, I found six boxes in a cupboard, plus envelopes in drawers and loose pictures inside books. The first thing I did was clear the dining table and decide that nothing else would live there until the job was finished. I nearly started by scanning everything, but that would have created hundreds of files with no order. So I began with years. Where a date was written on the back, that was easy. When it was not, clothes, cars and children's ages usually gave me a rough idea. I made piles by decade rather than trying to guess the exact year. The oldest photographs were curling at the edges. A friend who works in a gallery told me not to press them under heavy books, which had been my plan. She suggested putting the fragile pictures inside paper sleeves. I bought a packet of plain sleeves and used them only for the fragile pictures. Names were another problem. My mother recognised nearly everyone, but she tended to say things like 'that's your aunt's neighbour' and then move on. I asked her to write names in pencil on separate labels, not on the photographs themselves. Pencil was useful because we could correct mistakes without leaving a mess. For digital copies, I chose a simple naming system. Each file begins with the year if we know it, followed by a place and then one person's name. I tried adding full descriptions, but filenames became so long that nobody could read them on a phone. I expected the scanner to be the slow part. In fact, deciding what not to keep took longer. We had several almost identical pictures from the same birthday or holiday. Instead of saving every one, we chose the clearest photo from each group and put the duplicates in a separate envelope for relatives to take. I kept one small pile marked 'uncertain' for pictures we could not place at all. Returning to them later was much easier than stopping the whole job every time one face or street was unfamiliar. One discovery changed the whole project. At the bottom of a box we found a small notebook in which my grandfather had written where he lived during different years. Suddenly a lot of unidentified street scenes made sense. The notebook was far more useful than any computer tool. Once the files were ready, I copied them onto a hard drive. I also made a second copy online, because keeping both copies in my parents' flat would not protect us from fire or theft. My brother has the password, so the family is not depending on one person remembering it. We finished by making a short album for my parents. It does not contain the rarest photographs. We chose pictures that would make them talk: first jobs, old kitchens, funny haircuts and crowded family meals. That turned out to be the best test of whether the whole project had worked.