Negatives & Slides Archives - Picture This Organized

April 28, 2017June 1, 2018Digital organizing, Digitizing, Home Movies, Negatives & Slides, Organizing, Photo Albums, Photos, Print photos

How Much Does It Cost to Hire a Photo Organizer?

Hiring a photo organizer is like enlisting a professional trainer to help get you in shape – it’s a process that happens over time. You wouldn’t hire a trainer to for one ten-minute weight-training session – and you don’t hire a photo organizer for one 15-minute block of time, either.

Hiring a photo organizer is a way to find a healthier approach to managing your photos. It will take time and effort to reach your goals, and you’ll want to hire the best possible people to help you along the way.

A lot of people want to know, “How much does it cost to hire a photo organizer?” and the answer to that question is always, “It depends.”

Let’s take a look at why photo organizing fees vary from client to client, what you should consider when you’re trying to decide if you should hire a photo organizer, and how we (at Picture This Organized) typically charge for our services.

3 Things to Consider When You’re Thinking About Hiring a Photo Organizer

Before you try to find an organizer to work with you, keep these things in mind:

1. Success requires a long term commitment.

Many people have photos all over their homes – in multiple file folders, in photo boxes in the backs of their closets, and hidden in hundreds of different folders on their computers and other devices. It’s no wonder a lot of people don’t know where their favorite photos are stored, and it’s not surprising that they keep most of their best family stories buried!

Whatever your photo situation looks like right now, remember that it took you years to get to this point. It will take time to get things straightened out. Sorting, organizing, digitizing, and backing up your photos will all take time, so you should expect to pay for many hours with a photo organizer.

Your success completely depends upon your level of commitment to the process, so you should also make sure you’ve got the time and energy to commit to working with your organizer and maintaining the system you create.

2. Photo organizing works best when you work with a professional who is well-trained and knowledgeable about the best approaches.

A qualified photo organizer will not only keep you motivated and accountable as you’re trying to maintain your new organizing system, but they can also prevent you from unknowingly doing harm.

For example, we always make sure you’ve keep the very best quality copy of the photos you’re organizing. You always want to keep the image from the original source, rather than a poorer-quality digital version from a CD or other source. We pay careful attention to these details, to make sure your photo collection is the very best it can be.

An professional photo organizer can put systems in place that are proven, and also customize those systems for your unique situation. Working with a professional also makes it easier to stay on track, exercise consistent discipline, and keep moving forward on your path to success.

3. Working with a photo organizer requires an investment of time and money.

Prices for professional photo organizing services are always based on the organizer’s value to you, the time needed to complete your project, and the organizer’s level of expertise.

The larger your needs are, the more time will be needed to organize your photos. How much time you’ll need to book with your organizer will depend on:

The amount of photos you have.
How many different devices you use for taking and storing photos.
How organized (or disorganized) you currently are.
The scope of your project.

Your investment will ultimately get you great results and give you enormous long term value, so hiring a photo organizer shouldn’t be a price-driven decision. When it comes to working with service providers like photo organizers, you always get what you pay for – so hiring the cheapest organizer probably isn’t a good idea.

Your family photos are priceless and irreplaceable. When you ask most people what they would rescue first if a house fire or other emergency threatened their homes, most people have “family photos” at the tops of their lists.

Why would you put your photos in the hands of someone who doesn’t have the experience or expertise to handle them properly? When you’re hiring a photo organizer, hire the most qualified (and most experienced) professional that you can afford.

Things That Will Affect the Cost of Your Photo Organizing Project

1. Your timeline. If you have a short deadline, some organizers will charge you a rush fee. Try to give your organizer as much time as possible so he or she can get to know you, your family, and your goals. If you absolutely must complete the work on short notice, you may have to adjust your expectations and work on just a portion of the project, so you can meet your timeline.

2. Getting help with scanning/digitizing of prints, slides, negatives, and movies. Scanning and digitizing of these items can be a time-consuming process, so you’ll need to pay more to have your organizer perform or manage these services for you. These services are typically priced by the scan, or by the length of the videotape, but some organizers charge by the hour.

3. The age of the media you’re working with. Newer media (like digital images) are typically less expensive to organize and back up than older, more fragile media (like home movies on tapes). Old prints and movie reels are more expensive to scan, because they’re more difficult (and more delicate) to work with.

If you’re organizing your digital images, costs will differ depending on:

How disorganized your digital photo collection is.
The number of devices you’re keeping photos on.
The number of photos you’ve got in your collection.

If you have lots of photos across multiple devices, it will take longer to gather them into one place and organize them. Photo organizing services include looking for duplicates, and renaming your images based on the date the photo is taken, the event in the photo, and the person in the image. We do this renaming so you can easily search for your photos based on these details.

This process takes time, but is worthwhile to create a system that will allow them to locate specific photos. Imagine what it would be like to be able to find all of the pictures of your mom (or daughter, or spouse) by just doing a quick search on your computer. Or how easy it will be to create a beautiful and meaningful photo album to give to your son for his college graduation. When your photo collection is well-organized, these tasks are so much easier!

4. The type of project you need help with. When your professional organizer helps you with organizing and managing your photos, work will typically be priced by the hour, or by the session. If organizers are creating slideshow or albums for you, they usually charge a fixed amount, which includes a limited amount of photos, and a set number of revisions.

What to Expect When You Hire Picture This Organized

I offer a free 30-minute phone consultation to get to know prospective clients, and find out more about their photo organizing goals. After a client decides they want to work with me, I typically charge by the half-day session.

During your first (paid) session, we’ll do an assessment, which means we’ll gather media and items to get started, then organize a plan for how we’d like to move forward.

In most cases, I ask my clients to pre-pay for two to three sessions, which we’ll use for services like scanning, organizing, and backing up your photos.

As we work through the pre-paid sessions (either in person, or remotely), I’ll keep you updated on our progress. When we get to the end of your pre-paid time, we’ll agree on what our next steps should be, and I’ll bill you for more sessions, as needed.

If I’m scanning/digitizing your images, I’ll quote you a price that is a combination of a price per item PLUS the cost of my time to incorporate the new digital files into your organizing system. The more photos you have to scan, and the more delicate those images are, the more costly your digitizing project will be.

If I’m helping you organize your entire photo collection, it will require multiple sessions. It’s definitely not a one-afternoon job. We DON’T provide up-front estimates of project size and cost, because we don’t know how long your project will take to complete – but we DO provide regular updates and work with you to ensure you are getting the outcome you desire.

If I’m creating a photo album for you, prices will vary because every album is customized. Album creation involves three phases: Selecting photos, designing the album, and publishing the album. Each of these phases is priced separately.

To find out more about how it works when you hire a photo organizer, you can check out our previous post, What (Exactly) Does a Photo Organizer Do?

Want to Hire Picture This Organized? Here Are Your Next Steps

Picture what it would be like it you had:

All of your irreplaceable old photos, albums and slides converted to digital format, so you could access share them easily, and you knew they would be protected for future generations.
All of your print photos sorted and organized in bins, drawers, or boxes.
Every photo on your camera memory cards, electronic device, and computers backed up and protected.
Easy (and fast) access to every photo in your collection, so you could easily select images to share with friends and family and display in your home.

I know we’ve talking a lot about pricing and logistics in this post, but I want you to remember your ultimate goal: Being able to find, display, share, and enjoy your photo collection. We can help you achieve that goal – and even make the process fun and enjoyable.

If you’d like to organize your photo collection, create an album or slideshow, or digitize your photos or videos, I’d love to talk with you! Contact me to set up your free phone consultation.

April 13, 2017June 1, 2018Archiving, Digitizing, Negatives & Slides, Organizing, Photos, Scanning

What Should I Do with All My Slides and Photo Negatives?

When I help clients go through their prints to get their photo collections organized, we will often find negatives and slides mixed in with their prints.

My clients usually ask me, “What should I do with these? Should I transfer them all over to digital format? How do I do that? Then what should I do with the original slides and negatives, if I digitize everything?”

These are complicated questions, and the answers I give my clients always depend on a lot of factors. In this post, I’m going to give you some tips about digitizing and organizing your slides and negatives, talk about the pros and cons of hanging on to the originals, and explains how to store them safely.

Should You Digitize Your Negatives and Slides?

Let’s start with the first big question: Is it a good idea to digitize all your negatives and slides?

The question I always ask my client is, “Are these photos already printed or digitized?”

If the images are printed, you can digitize the print instead of the slide or negative – which is often considerably less expensive. If the images are not printed, my recommendation is that you digitize the images first, then consider whether or not you want to keep the original negatives or slides.

The best way to digitize your slides and negatives is to find a reputable company to help you. I recommend Memories to Digital (they have stores in Boulder and Lone Tree, Colorado) and FotoBridge. If you would like help managing this process, I can oversee the project so the scanning company has all information needed.

But here’s the problem: Digitizing slides and negatives can be expensive, especially if your slides are old. If you take a large collection of slides in to a conversion company and have them scan all of them for you, you will be charged for ALL the images you give the scanning company – even the badly composed or poorly lit shots.

If you aren’t on a tight budget and/or don’t have that many slides or negatives to scan, I’d recommend just scanning all of them – it’s simpler and easier. However, if you want to be discerning and only scan your very best shots, you’ll need to view your slides or negatives in advance to choose the ones you want to digitize.

How to Select the Best Slides and Negatives to Digitize

Here are some options for viewing your slides and negatives:

You can do it the old-fashioned way, and hold your slide or negative up to a lamp or overhead light in your home. This is a bit cumbersome, but it still works!
If you’ve got an iPad, there’s an app called Light Pad that you can buy to use your tablet as a negative viewer. It works with both slides and negatives.
You can use a light tracer (yes, one of those devices we used to use as kids, that artists use to trace images) to lit up your image. The images you’ll view will still be tiny if you use this method, though.
You can use a low resolution scanner to scan a temporary file for viewing and selecting the best negatives or slides to send to the digitizing company. This will let you see a larger, more detailed version of the image, which will help you in making your digitizing decisions. Amazon has several models that are affordable and perfect for this process.

When shopping for low-resolution slide and negative scanners, look for ones that are compatible with your computer. Often, a device designed for PCs won’t be Mac compatible, and vice versa. Also, look for the option to import your scans to a computer so that you can view from your computer screen. Otherwise, you might be viewing the scan from a small screen on the scanner – which is really not much better than just holding your slide up to the light in your living room!

Important note: If you’re going to go the scanner route for viewing your slides, I don’t recommend that you do the final scanning yourself on this type of equipment, because inexpensive scanners will scan your slides and negatives at a low resolution. That means your digitized images won’t be clear, and you won’t be able to enlarge them past their original size. Typically a slide or negative is best scanned at 1500-4000 dpi, and you’ll usually need to go to a professional scanning and digitizing company with top-notch equipment to get that quality.

If you want to do your own scanning, you can purchase a high-quality scanner (again, look for the dpi quality listed above), but keep in mind that it’s a tedious, time-consuming process.

How to Get Your Slides and Negatives Organized for Your Scanning Company

Once you’ve selected the slides and negatives you want to scan, try to put them into a logical order so that the company will scan your images in order of timeline and event. Otherwise, you’ll have to do some digital organizing once you get your digital images back – and I think it’s easier to do this organizing at the beginning of your project.

Ask your scanning company about what resolution they’ll use to scan your images. If you plan to print a photo that’s 5×7 or smaller, or if you’re going to email the image or put it onto a web page, I recommend 1500 dpi. For the highest quality for archiving and printing, 3000 to 4500 dpi is best.

You may have slides where the owner or photographer wrote some information about the photo directly onto the slide frame. In this case, ask your slide scanning company if their scan can include this information. These details will be helpful for naming your files.

For example, the scanning company may just name your image files using your name, followed by the image number (“Smith-001.jpg”). After you receive the files, you can rename specific images with the detail written onto the slide frame (for example, if the slide says, “1960 family picnic,” you can name the file “1960-Smith-Family Picnic-001.jpg”).

The Pros and Cons of Keeping Your Slides and Negatives

Wondering whether or not you should hang on to your original slides and negatives? Here are the pros and cons of keeping them:

Pros of Keeping Your Slides and Negatives:

Your slides and negatives are the originals of your images, and they contain all the information needed to digitize.
Digital files aren’t completely fail-safe. Hard drives can fail, we can lose our computers, and sometimes we accidentally delete files. By saving our original slides and negatives, can always go back and replace what’s been lost.
Sometimes, there are scanning errors (wrong dpi, slides are dirty when they are scanned, etc.). If the digitized version isn’t done properly, you can always go back to the original and rescan it.
Technology is always improving, so at some point in the future, we might invent a device to scan old media in a higher quality.

Cons of Keeping Your Slides and Negatives:

Your originals can take up space in your home, and you’ll have to make room to store them long-term.
Slides and negatives can be difficult to view.
Your slides and negatives can be more expensive to scan than your photo prints.
The support for scanning equipment for slides and negatives may not keep pace with technology, so you might end up with equipment you can’t use or slides you can’t scan at all.

How to Store Your Negatives and Slides and Keep Them Safe

If you decide you’re going to keep your negatives and slide, you’ll want to store them safely to make sure they don’t get damaged or degraded.

For negatives, you can store them in archive quality envelopes, or get sleeves that can be stored in a 3-ring binder. There are also sleeves or file boxes made especially for slides. You’ll need to choose the right storage method for you, based on the amount of storage you have to work with – just make sure your storage containers are always archive quality.

Here a note from the National Archives, about choosing storage methods for your negatives, etc.:

“Negatives and transparencies can be stored the same way as photographic prints, using the same high quality papers and plastic which pass the ANSI IT9.16 Photographic Activity Test (PAT). (The PAT was developed by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and is a test that determines whether or not a storage material will cause fading or staining in photographs.) There are paper and plastic enclosures and storage boxes designed for film formats available from most manufacturers. Like prints, negatives and transparencies should be stored in a cool, dry location.”