Hasta La Ideas

Earlier this year, I had all of my old print photographs professionally scanned (I used scanmyphotos.com and it was around $150 per box of 2,250 pics). Next, I uploaded all of my digital scans to my Flickr pro account and to iPhoto (so far, I have decided not to upgrade to Aperture) on my laptop so that I have the files backed up in multiple locations in addition to having them on DVD. As far as these processes were concerned, the process was easy as pie. (Mmmmmm, pie.)

I am now comfortable with knowing that if my house burns to the ground, decades of photographic memories will not be lost.

However, I am a bit frustrated about the next step in my photo organizing process and I’m looking for some advice. I wish to enter all of the text that I have written on the back of the photographs into the corresponding image’s Notes/Description field. And, I wish to categorize the sets of images into meaningful groups. Doing these two steps, however, seems to be Herculean.

Does anyone out in the Unclutterer readership have a suggestion for how to speed up this process?

• What is the fastest way to enter data from the back of a photograph into a Notes/Description field? Should I enlist the help of a friend? Hire a neighborhood kid to do it? Streamline the process in some way?
• What is the most meaningful way to categorize groups of photographs? Is date order always the best method? What other systems do people use that have proven to be worthwhile?

Let me say, “thank you,” ahead of time, because this has been a bit of a nightmare for me. I look at the box of photographs that have been scanned and feel overwhelmed by the next step in the process.