Tips for photo sorting
1. Gather your photos from everywhere - remember the drawer in the coffee table, your night stand, grandma's trunk, your office, the pile on the dining room table and those that actually got stuck in one of the "magnetic' photo albums.

2. You'll need some supplies - for right now, just use stuff you find around the house - shirt boxes or shoe boxes, sticky notes, a pen, envelopes or quart size zip lock freezer bags - and, if you have negatives, some acid free - negative holder sheets. www.pfile.com is the source I use for negative holders.

3. Find a space to work where you can make piles, like your bed, or the dining room table.

4. First cut - I suggest a rough cut by decade, a pile for each - even if you can't identify the folks in the photo, or the occasion - generally it is possible to say from looking at clothes, cars or hair styles - whether it was the 60's, 70's or 80's or the 1880's . This part should go fairly quickly and it will be satisfying to see unsorted boxes, bags and envelopes of photos sorted into at least a semblance of order.

5. As you come across negatives intermingled with the pictures, put those right away into a negative sheet or file box made for them - labeled, as far as you are able with date or decade, and subject. Sheets of negatives can then be stored in a three ring binder, for convenience.

6. Remove those photos from the 'magnetic albums' - they will turn yellow and fade in there quicker than anywhere else that I know of. Usually they'll fall out easily. If they stick pretty hard, you can try carefully prying them up with a butter knife, or use a little of the solvent 'UN-do™" to release the glue. You can also try sliding a piece of dental floss under a reluctant photo. If it looks like the extraction is going to be painful, I suggest making a color copy or scan of the page first - so that if you damage the photo when removing it, you will still have a good copy.

7. If you have to stop during your task, set your sorted piles in one of your boxes with a sticky note on top noting the 'decade'. Or put each pile into a freezer bag and label it with what you know - like the decade.

8. Continue until all your pictures are roughly sorted. Some themes may have emerged that will help you with the next part.

a. For example, you notice while sorting that there are lots of pictures of your mothers side of the family and your fathers side of the family. Decision point. Do you wish to continue to sort chronologically, or separate out the families? 1950, 1960 etc or mother's name 1950, mother's name 1960, etc.

b. You notice the 1960's pile is top heavy with one subject- perhaps your first safari. In fact, it looks like you have more than enough material for an album right there. So, you separate those pictures into a bag of their own and sort the rest of the decade chronologically. Later, you can go back and sort the safari trip however you like - in the chronological order of the trip or by camp, guide, or theme such as a group of hoofed animals, or a group of savanna plants.

9. Pick a decade, and sort through it the second time.
a. Be discriminating. Unless you have very few pictures, you most likely will NOT put every one in a memory album. If you have 16 pictures of Aunt Mable on a Wednesday in March 1945, you can probably toss the blurry ones.
b. Send unwanted duplicates to other family members. Group the rest as best you can either by event, year, family or whatever theme you've seen.
c. This is the place where you can jot answers to the questions who? What? When? Where? Why? On a sticky note and put it on the relevant group of photos.

10. Portraits tend to be much larger than everything else. I'd store them separately in a nice photo safe envelope or memory album full of empty page protectors - functional rather than decorative, at this stage, it will keep them safe, flat, and you can flip through and find the one you want easily. NOTE TO SELF - put a slip of paper in with the relevant decade in your other photos noting that you have the portrait, and WHERE YOU PUT IT!

11. See how organized you feel once order emerges? It will be easy to keep that way if, every time you get a new envelope of pictures, you label them and put the negatives in a labeled negative page.

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Caring for your photos and memory albums (what is 'acid free' anyway?)
1. Photographs are fragile. They're vulnerable to heat, light, cracking, scratching, fingerprints, insect damage, mold, mildew, humidity, water damage, rubber bands, and a wide variety of glues, pastes, adhesive tapes, and plastics such as pvc, as well as discard due to lack of identification.

2. Acid is a a chemical substance that can weaken paper and cloth, causing it to turn brown and brittle. A material will be acidic, if it's "ph" number is lower than 7. Seven is acid neutral. Greater than seven, the material is basic instead of acidic. Lignon occurs naturally in plant products and may therefore be present in paper which is made from trees. Over time it breaks down into acids that will harm photos and documents.

3. Photo safe scrapbook materials will be acid and lignon free. Other materials may be used in scrapbooks if they are isolated from valuable pictures, or treated with a barrier coating such as "archival mist.™"

4. We use albums that are of archival quality, meaning acid free. Archival plastics include cellulose triacetate, DuPont Mylar, polyester, polyethylene, and polypropylene. The easy rule of thumb is - if you can smell the plastic - don't use it! That "new car" smell is the plastic outgassing chemicals - and they can harm your pictures.

5. Storage boxes, envelopes and the like should also be archival quality. If your pictures are important to you - buy your long term storage solutions from a source such as your local scrapbook store, or an internet company such as www.P-file.com. Discount store photo boxes, old shoe boxes and manila envelopes are unlikely to be photosafe. Zip lock bags are for temporary holding only. The illustrated storage box is by Highsmith.

6. - Do not store pictures in high temperature or high humidity areas, as this can cause mold growth or hasten the chemical reaction in the photos. Avoid attics and basements to store your precious memories. They'd prefer to live in the same places where you prefer to live - relatively dry, heated and air conditioned spaces.

7. Dyes and inks can fade. Avoid prolonged exposure to light to minimize fading.

8. Use acid free adhesives, tapes or photo corners that are to mount photos on pages.

9. Try not to write on the picture, especially the picture side. If you write on the back with an acid free pen or #2 pencil, lay the photo on a very hard surface, and press only gently lest the pen indentation be visible on the picture side. An alternative temporary solution is to write on the envelope containing the pictures (beware they are not soon parted) or on a sticky note adhered to the back of the photo.

10. - For long term storage of valuable pictures, consider having them scanned and put on CD.

11. - Alternatively, make copies of the pictures you want to show most often. Let them take all the wear and tear of handling while the original lies in archival storage.

12. Newspaper clippings are particularly vulnerable to rapid decay. I suggest photocopying them on acid free paper, or scanning them into the computer for printing.

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