Organizing scans into a folder that makes sense
Okay. You've got photos scanned, you've dated the ones you can, you've written captions. Now let's talk about where all this actually lives on your computer, because right now it's probably sitting in one folder called "Photos" or, dang, worse, still sitting on your desktop.
I get why this feels like the boring lesson. It's not the fun part. But this is the part that decides whether you find the right photo in October when you're actually building the video, or whether you spend forty minutes scrolling through three hundred thumbnails trying to remember if Grandpa's fishing trip was file 087 or 093.
Start with the biggest folder, then split
Make one folder for the whole project. Something like Grandma_Photos_2026. Inside that, split by whatever makes sense for your pile. For most people it's one of two ways:
- By decade or era —
1950s,1960s,Unknown - By person or family branch —
Grandma_kids,Grandma_siblings,Grandpa_Navy
I'm not going to tell you which one is right, because it depends on your photos. If you've got two hundred photos spanning sixty years, go by decade. If you've got a manageable pile that's mostly about one specific person, go by person. I like decade folders, that's just me — it matches how I think about "which video am I making," since most of my projects end up being about a chunk of someone's life, not their whole life.
Whatever you pick, write it down somewhere. A sticky note, a notes app, whatever. You will forget your own system in three weeks. Everyone does.
Name the files like a person who wants to find them again
This is the same opinion I gave you back when we talked about the video editor, and I'm giving it to you again because it matters just as much here, maybe more. Don't leave your scans named IMG_4471.jpg. Rename them.
My format is: date (or best guess) — subject — source. Something like:
1961_approx_Grandma-kitchen_Josephine.jpg
That tells me the decade, what's in it, and whose photo it originally was, all without opening the file. When you've got three hundred of these, that's the difference between finding a photo in ten seconds and finding it in ten minutes.
Batch-renaming tools exist and they're fine, but honestly for most people's pile size, doing it by hand while you're already looking at each photo to caption it isn't much extra work. You're already in there. Just type the new name while you're at it.
A folder for "no idea," and that's fine
You're going to have photos you can't date, can't name, can't place. Make a folder called Unknown or Unsorted and put them there without guilt. Don't leave them scattered loose in the main folder just because you don't know what to do with them yet. A labeled "I don't know" folder is still organized. An unlabeled mess is not.
I actually had a moment with this that turned into something better than I expected. I was recording an interview with my nephew Briggs's family, going through old photos on camera, and Briggs walked into the room in the middle of it. He looked at the pile of unsorted, unlabeled photos on the table and asked if the dead people in them could hear him.
I paused the recording. I didn't brush it off. I told him honestly what I believe, which took about thirty seconds, and then we kept going. It ended up being a better piece of the conversation than most of what I'd planned to ask that day. But here's the thing that stuck with me afterward: those photos on the table were unsorted for a reason. Nobody had made them make sense yet. A kid walked in and had a real question about people he couldn't place, because the pile itself couldn't answer who they were. Your folder system is part of how you answer that question before someone has to ask it out loud.
One caution: don't rename your only copy
If you're renaming files, make sure you're doing it on a copy that's already backed up somewhere else, not on the one and only version sitting in your camera roll or on an old hard drive. Renaming itself won't destroy a file, but if you're also moving things between folders and your computer hiccups mid-move — it happens more than you'd think, especially with a big batch — you don't want that to be your only copy of anything. Back up first. I say this every single week and I'll keep saying it.
Before next time
Get your scans into folders with a system you could explain to your mom in one sentence, and rename at least the ones you know the most about. Leave the mystery ones in their own folder without guilt — we'll use some of them next time when we talk about pulling all this together into an actual sequence.