Preserving Family Photos and Documents: Scanning, Naming and Storing

How to digitise old family photographs and documents properly: scanner settings, file formats, naming, identifying people and long-term storage.

A shoebox of photographs is a family history waiting to be lost: to damp, to a house move, to the death of the one person who knew who was in the pictures. Digitising it well is a weekend's work, and it protects the originals as well as the memory.

Scanning settings

• Photographs: 600 dpi for prints up to 10 × 15 cm, 400 dpi for larger ones. Save as TIFF for the master copy and JPEG for everyday use.
• Documents: 300 dpi in colour, even for black-and-white paper; colour keeps the stamps, the ink shades and the stains that help date a document.
• Negatives and slides: 2,400 dpi or more, which needs a scanner with a film adapter or a service.
• Very large items (certificates, maps): scan in overlapping sections and stitch them, or photograph them flat in even daylight.

Switch off automatic sharpening and dust removal for the master scan; you can always adjust a copy. Do not crop the master; the edges of a photograph often carry a studio stamp or a date.

Naming the files

Use a pattern that sorts by date and says what the file is:

• 1925-06-20_wedding_Kowalski-Jan_Nowak-Maria_Krakow_photo.tif
• 1931-08-05_letter_Kowalski-Jan_to_brother_p1.tif
• undated-c1910_portrait_Nowak-Maria_studio-Rembrandt-Tarnow.tif

Put uncertain dates in the name with c for circa and keep the reasoning in a notes file.

Identifying the people

This is the part that cannot wait. Sit with the oldest relatives, show the scans on a tablet, and write down who is in each picture, from left to right, with the occasion and the place. Store that information in three places: in the photo's metadata (IPTC caption), in a text file next to the images, and in your genealogy program attached to the people concerned. A photograph without names becomes decorative within a generation.

Photographer's stamps and clues

The back of a studio portrait often names the photographer and the town. Trade directories give the years the studio operated, which dates the picture. Clothing, hairstyles and the type of card mount narrow it further.

Storing the originals

• Remove photographs from magnetic albums and rubber bands.
• Store in acid-free envelopes or sleeves, upright, in a cool dry room, not the attic or the cellar.
• Write on the back only with a soft pencil, lightly, near the edge.
• Keep documents flat, unfolded, in archival folders.

Storing the digital copies

Follow the 3-2-1 rule: three copies, on two kinds of media, one of them off-site (a cloud service or a relative's house). Check the copies once a year and move them to new media every five years. TIFF and JPEG will remain readable for decades; proprietary formats will not.

Using them

Attach the JPEG copies to the people in your tree. The link survives in the GEDCOM file as a media reference, and the images can become the illustrations of your family history book: a portrait at the head of each family's entry, with the names in the caption, is what turns a list of dates into people.