Sorting a house full of photographs

Every house has a box of photographs in it, and usually a second box nobody has opened since the last move. You can't sort them by weight or size, and you can't throw out a face you don't recognize in case somebody else would have known it.

Start with the albums, not the loose boxes

Albums and envelopes from the photo lab are already in order, and they carry the names and the years with them. Do those first, because they remind you who everybody is before you hit the loose pile where nobody is labeled.

If somebody is helping you, put them on the albums and keep the unidentified pile to yourself for now. Two people guessing at the same face is how the argument starts.

Three piles, and the middle one gets a name on it

Keep, ask, let go. The ask pile is for the photo where you know the event but not the person, or the person but not the year. Write the question on a sticky note on the back — don't keep it in your head, you'll forget which cousin you meant.

The ask pile gets one pass at the next family gathering and then it's decided. Photograph anything you're mailing to a relative before it leaves the house.

What earns a spot in the keep pile

• Faces with a name you can write on the back
• A street, a house or a job that isn't there anymore
• One good picture of a wedding, a graduation, a funeral
• The last photo of somebody
• Anything with handwriting on the back
• The baby book and the school portraits, kept whole

Write it down while somebody can still tell you

Pencil, soft lead, along the bottom edge of the back. Name, place, year if you know it. Ballpoint soaks through thin paper and shows on the front, and marker bleeds.

This is the part people put off, and it's the only part that gets permanently lost. The people who can answer those questions are the same people who are getting harder to ask.

Duplicates, negatives and slides

Duplicates are fine to let go once you've picked the better print, but check the back of both first. One copy sometimes has a date or a name the other doesn't, and that's the one to keep.

Negatives and slides are a separate job and they take longer than prints do. Call a local photo shop or a historical society before you bin a whole collection. Some will take it, some won't, and one phone call settles it.

The frames and the sticky albums

Old albums with adhesive pages and plastic covers can stick to prints and stain them over years. If the photos matter, lift them out slowly and store them flat in a plain box in a closet, not in an attic or a garage.

Don't break a good frame getting a photo out. Slide the backing off and lift. The frame is the cheap part, but the glass cuts you either way.

The box marked misc is where the good ones hide, so open every box before it goes out. And don't leave the only copy of anything in a shed or a garage where heat and damp get at it — that's how a photo becomes a blank rectangle.