The Great Big Photo Project

Attempting to bring order to hundreds of loose photos in genre-specific piles on my dining room table

So - I was at my parent's house for Thanksgiving this year, and I had my Mom bring out the 'great big box of photos.' This was a huge rubber-maid container that was full to the rim with family pictures - including originals from 1914 Arkansas, mingled in with wallet-sized school photos, to multiple sleeves of my sisters volleyball team and cars cars cars. You know the sports photos I am sure - shot from the bleachers with a point-and-click camera, there is no focus to the picture - just a bunch of small figures in matching uniforms doing indiscernible things on a gymnasium floor. Each shot is pretty much the same. Each roll generally has 1 redeemable picture - a group shot at the close of the game - where you can actually tell who is who. The others are interchange-ably bad, and no one really needs to ever see them again. Oh, and there are usually double-prints.

A great shot of my Dad and Aunt Jane with my Grandmother.

As to the cars, My dad and I went to the 24 hours of Daytona for several years in a row when I was growing up. this was a really wonderful event that involved us camping in the infield, and roaming about the entire racetrack for the entire 24 hrs of the race. To prove I was there, I would lug my point-an-shoot camera around with me, trying to capture the moment a Porsche 956 would belch flame when downshifting around a chicane. I would sidle up to some professional toting a huge rig with a 3 foot long lens, and try and try and duplicate his shot with a small plastic camera that had no hope of focusing on the cars moving at 150 mph. I have rolls and rolls of blurry pics from these events - with nary a worthwhile picture in the bunch.

My great-great-grandmother. Written on the back in my grandmother's (paternal) handwriting: "Martha Ann Byrd Looney had 16 brothers and sisters. Married James Isam Looney Sept 8, 1871. They had 10 children 1) WJ, 2) S.A., 3) M.F., 4) Manuel Dodson, 5) M.E., 6) George A., 7) Mollie, 8) John Stubblefield, 9) James Virgle (my great-grandfather), 10) J. Everett. Mar 4 1855 - Nov 17, 1942."

The good stuff is the family photos. there are some great shots of my sister and me, and a number of old pics I have never seen before. I am in the process of trying to organize it all into some sort of cohesion before I attempt to begin the digitization process.  I am looking at http://scanmyphotos.com. To scan these myself would take forever. I am hoping this will work, though it is somewhat scary sending all of these pics out to a 3rd party. To that end I am trying to identify the truly crucial one-of-a-kind pics and scanning those myself. However, to my thinking, if I don't do something to organize and digitize these pics, they are effectively lost anyway, so it is worth the risk of sending them away.