Some Non-Professional Advice for Organizing and Preserving Memories

I apologize for a long overdue post, but I have been preoccupied with my PhD program, which seems to be consuming every aspect of my life.  Even so, I have maintained a few hobbies, one of which is photography.  Now, while I like to think of photography as an escape from science, I’m finding that often my lab skills bleed into this amateur hobby.  

Take for instance how we track the rainbow trout in our studies.  Ideally, I could recognize my fish by eye, but, alas, I’m horrible with faces.  Instead, we insert a PIT tag into each fish, which, when scanned, provides a unique ID for the fish.  Associated with each ID, in my lab notebook, are the treatments the fish has received, the white blood cell counts, the level of antibodies, and so forth.  Keeping track of this data can be overwhelming, but detailed, clear notes simplify the process…

Keeping track of hundreds of rainbow trout is a daunting task. Thank you, PIT tags!

Okay, so how does this relate to my photography, you may be asking yourself.  Well, like many people, for years, I took digital photographs, which were either left on an SD card, transferred to a CD-R or hard drive, or uploaded to social media.  Unfortunately, with time, I have found some of the CD-R’s are no longer functional; more commonly, I simply have forgotten the significance of many of the photos.  I recognize the people in the photos, but I ask myself, Where were these photos taken?  What did we do that day?  Who else came on the trip?  Yes, physical media degrades or simply becomes obsolete (how many of us can extract photos from a ZIP disk?)  Memories, like the media, fade into nothingness…and for this reason, I have come up with some simple ideas to preserve memories for generations.  As you would guess, actually printing the photographs instead of keeping them on file is key to me (I assume my children will have a much easier time figuring out how to sift through images in a physical album than one on an old CD-R)

A common sight to anyone who has been saving photographs for the last ten years. Not shown are my many floppies and SD cards.

I guess before I begin with how I tackle my photographs, I’ll begin with a philosophical question.  What is the purpose of your photos?  Do you intend to pass the photos to relatives, or are they merely mementos to you?  This will likely affect how much effort you put into managing your photographs.  Think about that question as I go through my process of cataloging memories.

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1. Record the dates of the photographs:  Because I have switched to largely film photography, I jot down the dates that I took photographs.  For the larger digital audience, you can find this information in the metadata.
2. Record some memorable events that happened either in a word processor or a notebook:  Why did you take the photograph?  What funny events happened on that day?  Who was there?  Do this the day of the event while memories are fresh.  I have done this on my trusty ThinkPad since 2011.  If you are on vacation, consider carrying a notepad or journal and, at the end of the night, recording your day.
3. Print the photographs as soon as possible and record the relevant information from steps 1 and 2 on the back of the photo in indelible ink:  It becomes daunting to sort through hundreds of photographs (part of the reason I went to film!).  Working in manageable chunks makes life easier.  Recording the date the photograph was taken and some key memories of the event will ensure, as Kodak says, that you “Make those memories last a lifetime.”   ​​Store these photos in an album!  Scattering them in shoe boxes or envelopes is sure to lead to future frustrations.
   1. ​​If you intend on passing these photographs to other generations, state who is in the photograph and your relation to them.  Future generations want to know their relation (or lack of relation) to every person in the photograph—they will want to know if a given person was significant to you or just an acquaintance. 
4. If you have printed doubles of photographs or have negatives, mark the contents of the envelope in which they are contained:  Having had to sort through the contents of dozens of unmarked envelopes for negatives, many of which were from previous generations of family members, I can say life is so much easier when you don’t have to hunt for the one negative or photograph that is a needle in the haystack.  
5. Bonus idea:  Admittedly, I am obsessive with some areas of my life.  Rather than just jotting down a few key memories of the day, I keep a daily journal.  Perhaps consider the photographs as a part of your storybook…they only provide a visual to the story of your life.  I do hope that one day, my children and grandchildren will go through my diary and match the dates with the photographs.  By the way, my journal (and photograph captions) is entirely honest; I don’t want my ancestors to get a Kodachrome vision of the past, where they think all the world’s a sunny day—we have people in our lives who we don’t care for.  There are political issues that anger us.  We have days where we want to crawl under a rock.  These are common threads that tie humanity together.

There you have it.  I know much of the information is common sense, but maybe I have a few tips that you haven't considered.  I am sure, like me, many of you have inherited photo albums from grandparents in which you cannot identify the majority of the people in the photographs, let alone the dates the photographs were taken or memories associated with these dates…let’s assist future generations in feeling tied with the past (After all, isn’t this yearning the reason we have such websites as Ancestry.com?)  

Do you know who this is? Neither do I. I inherited this with a set of photographs, but no information was provided.