It’s confession time. I thought I knew the answer to that question.

I don’t.

Recently, while creating a slideshow for an upcoming family event, I had to face an uncomfortable truth: some of my photos were not a keystroke away. For someone who teaches photo organization, that’s a humbling realization.

Over the years, multiple computers and photo-organizing systems quietly separated me from my own images. You probably know exactly what I mean. One laptop here, an external drive there, a folder saved “temporarily” that never made it back into the main collection.

The irony isn’t lost on me. My older family photographs—the ones I’ve carefully researched—are beautifully organized, labeled, and preserved on Forever.com with embedded metadata. But my everyday life photos? They’ve been a little… neglected.

Are they lost? No.

They exist—scattered across hard drives, tucked into backups, and saved during transitions from one computer to another. The problem isn’t loss. It’s access.

And access is everything.

If you can’t easily find a photo, you can’t use it, share it, or pass along the story behind it. That’s when images quietly slip out of your active family history and into digital obscurity.

So I’m doing what I often recommend to others: going back and reclaiming my own collection.

Here’s a simple path you can follow too:

1. Gather everything in one place
Track down images from old computers, external drives, cloud services, and even email attachments. Think of this as your digital “photo reunion.”

2. Consolidate into a single system
Whether you use Forever.com or another platform, choose one primary home for your images. Fragmentation is the enemy of access.

3. Add meaningful metadata
Names, places, dates, and relationships matter. Even partial information is valuable. Metadata turns a picture into a record.

4. Build a simple workflow going forward
Decide what happens to new photos: where they go, when they’re labeled, and how often you review them. Consistency beats perfection.

I’m working on this—and you can too.

It’s surprisingly easy to document the lives of our ancestors while overlooking our own. But someday, these everyday snapshots will be the “old family photos” someone else is trying to understand.

Let’s make it easier for them.

The post Do You Know Where All Your Photos Are? appeared first on Maureen Taylor.

It seemed like a good idea.  After trying for an hour to transfer these scans to my iPad I called Apple Support.  They are always helpful. Within an hour everything was set up and the images were now in Photos on my iPad.  Great!  Not so fast….

I opened the app and tried to search by keyword. Nope. Not an option. Searched the web and discovered that there were no solutions. Ridiculous, I thought.  That can’t be the case, could it? Indeed the reality is that you can’t search photos by keyword in Apple Photos on mobile apps.  You can search by year or by words in the title of the images.

Surely someone had created an app to fill this gap. Searching for photo organizers for the iPad I found two that seemed a likely fit.

Slidebox

This free app had great reviews. There are versions for IOS and Android.

It’s easy to use. Swipe to delete from your feed in the app or to move forward through images. Create albums and you can quickly add images by clicking the album below the picture.  Simple right.  Nope.  What I wanted an app to do was look at all my pictures including the ones I’d added through iCloud.  Sure Slidebox showed me all the pictures I’d taken with my iPad, but none of the images from my postcard album appeared.

Back to square one.

Pixsort

This one had real possibilities. According to the reviews the app lets you manage your images by date, location, people and keywords.  Bingo! You guessed it. There was a problem.  I saw a lot of the images on my iPad but not all of them. Instead of showing me the two hundred scans, I could see 23. That’s all.  I’d say that this is a big bug in the app.

On the plus side, the app did allow me to set up keywords for those images and made it easy to sort and see them.  Too bad I couldn’t view all of my pictures.

I’m hoping that the developers fix this wee issue.

Adobe Lightroom

Colleagues suggested I use Lightroom.  It’s a great tool but a bit expensive.  At close to ten dollars a month that’s more than a hundred dollars a year. Yikes!  At some point soon I’ll probably have to go with this option. The steep learning curve is what keeps me from making that investment.  It’s all about time and money.

A Simple Workaround

If all Photos on the iPad would let you sort by was date, place you took the image and a keyword in a title, I had a few options. I could go through every image and rename them.  Too time consuming for right now.  Then it hit me.  I could put the images into albums. The titles would correspond with general category type keywords for instance “Schools.”   It worked!  I could see all the images in organized digital piles.

You can do the same thing for all your family photos.

• Scan them and put a name in the file name to make it easy to find them on your mobile device.
• Create an album for each person.  Once you’ve created the album you can quickly add images to the album by selecting them.  I used the keywords on my desktop to make sure I found all the images for the specific albums.

This workaround fit my criteria.  I’ll be able to go to the show and see my images. It was an easy solution that didn’t take a lot of time to implement. It’s not perfect, but it will help me avoid duplicate purchases.  I still wish that I could search using all the keywords I set up for streets and buildings. It’s going to be clunky to browse all those pictures by album.

In the meantime, if you have a lot of pictures on your phone or tablet that you’ve taken with your devices experiment organizing them using the two apps mentioned above.  It won’t cost you anything to give them a try.

The post New Ideas for Organizing Photos on the iPad appeared first on Maureen Taylor.

Edward Munch’s  The Scream

Step 1: Interview Mabel

Step 2: Scan as You Go

• ·
  Scan each one at a minimum of 600 dpi as Tiff files. Tiff is an uncompressed format and is considered the right choice for preservation.
• ·
  Enter all the information in a chart. You can use Word or Excel depending on what you’re comfortable with.  This sample chart illustrates how to record the information.

Step 3: Sort and File

The post Essential Photo Organizing: Down and Dirty Photo Triage in Three Steps appeared first on Maureen Taylor.