Moisture and extreme temperatures can destroy photos while they’re waiting for your attention. Get them out of your basement, attic and/or garage. Find a spot in the back of a closet or out-of-the-way shelf to stash them until you’re ready to organize. Cardboard boxes and magnetic or sticky album pages can also be very damaging to photographs.

Old houses usually have tiny closets. While the linen closet is a great place to store your photos, that’s often not a realistic solution – it’s full of sheets and towels. What can you reasonably do to protect your photos?

• get your boxes of photos out of places with known threats: flooding, rodents, extreme temperatures.
• store your photos in plastic bins, preferably with the photos further protected in an archival-safe smaller box, envelope or bag. Sadly, the paper envelopes from the photo lab weren’t made with photo safe materials, same for old shoeboxes.
• get them out of the sticky albums ASAP and into a photo safe container. If you don’t have yellowing and damage yet, woo hoo! If you do, let’s get them out before it gets worse.
• BEFORE you take everything out of an album, it’s a good idea to photograph the groupings and writing on a page – often that’s important information about the people or places in the photos. We don’t want to lose that part! If you’re going to scan all your photos anyway, consider scanning the whole album page – journaling and all.
• If the photos are stuck in the album, don’t force it. There are tricks to get them out with as little damage as possible. Contact your friendly local photo organizer for help.

All this sounds great – but what if you don’t have time to get even this much done?

DELEGATE.

Find a friend, a teenager, another relative who can help you knock this project out. You might get a good visit and some great stories from a relative. You can help a poor high school or college student earn pizza money. It’s cheaper than restoring damaged photos later on, or the emotional cost of knowing that irreplaceable family history is destroyed.

Photo organizing takes time and focus. People are busy and those two things can be in short supply. Find a friend with similar photo organizing goals. Let them help you refocus when life’s inevitable distractions get in the way.

a very cute distraction

Who do you know that also wants to get their photos organized? Who can check in on your progress and cheer you on? How can you be helpful to your friend who wants to go from overwhelmed to organized with her own photo collection? If you don’t have a friend to team up with, a personal photo organizer can get you started in the right direction and keep you moving forward with your photo organizing goals.

There’s an ugly thought that lurks in the back of your mind when your back-up plan is based on crossing your fingers. What if something happens and my photos are GONE?!! Hard drives crash, laptops get stolen, cloud storage site goes under. It can (& does) happen – far too often. That’s why you need to back up your photos in at least 3 places.

If they’re digital, print them.

If they’re print, scan them.

Then keep at least one backup somewhere besides your own home. I keep a flash drive at my parents’ place. And another copy in the cloud.

If your photos are backed up, that doesn’t mean bad things won’t happen. But you can rest easy knowing that your special photos are protected.

What is your favorite trick for making regular back-ups of your photos quick and easy?

It’s normal for photo and video collections to have many thousands of files. Very hard to manage so many images. Check out our series of tips over the next few weeks to make this process less scary and help you go from overwhelmed to organized.

I’ve been told that 880 BILLION photos will be taken in 2014. Gulp. No wonder we’re so overwhelmed with our photo collections. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing some ideas about how to get started, and stay focused (and sane!) as you #GO Get Organized this month with your photos and videos.