How to sort a shoebox of family photos in one evening.

Do not scan anything yet.

The most common expensive mistake is scanning the box in the order it comes out of the wardrobe. That means scanning duplicates, scanning the backs of prints, scanning the blurry one and the sharp one of the same pose, and discovering at photo six hundred that you have already scanned the photograph you actually needed four times.

Scanning is the slow, boring, mechanical part. Do it once, on a sorted collection, and the whole project becomes tractable. Do it on an unsorted one and most people abandon it around the two hundredth print — which is worse than never starting, because now the work is half done and the pile is mixed.

Five piles, and a hard rule about not making a sixth.

Clear a table. Put the box at one end. Make five piles and only five. The sixth pile — the one labelled "decide later" — is what kills the project, because everything ends up in it.

Work fast. Two seconds per print, not two minutes. If you find yourself studying a photograph you have stopped sorting and started remembering, which is the entire reason the job never gets done. Set the ones that catch you aside face down and look at them at the end.

The pencil rule.

Every photograph that stays gets named. This is the single highest-value minute you will spend on the entire collection, because an unlabelled photograph becomes worthless the moment the last person who could identify it stops being able to.

• Soft pencil only — a 2B or softer graphite pencil, on the back of the print. Graphite sits on the surface and can be erased. Ink soaks in and cannot.
• Never on the image side. Even soft pencil leaves a permanent impression in the emulsion.
• Never biro, marker or stamp ink. These migrate through the paper over decades and reappear on the front of the print as ghost text. This is why so many old photos have reversed writing bleeding through them.
• Bottom edge, back. Keeps the writing out of the way when the print is mounted or scanned.
• Never tape a label on. The adhesive fails, yellows, and takes a layer of the image with it.

Write the full name, not a nickname, and the year if you know it. Add the place. If you are unsure, write the uncertainty: "probably Uncle Aldo, c. 1958." A hedged label is worth vastly more than a confident one that is wrong, because the next person can at least follow it.

What to do with people you cannot identify.

Every collection has them: studio portraits of strangers, formal wedding groups with no names, a handsome man in uniform from some war. Do not throw them away out of frustration, and do not let them stall the sort.

1. Ask the oldest living relative first — before you sort. Not after. By the time the sorting is finished, the person who could have named forty of them may no longer be able to.
2. Make an "unknown" folder and keep going. It is not a failure pile; it is a research queue. Revisit it once, later, with someone else in the room.
3. Read the clothes. Collars, sleeve width, hem length, hats and hairstyles date a photograph to within about five years. Cars, shopfronts and street furniture are even more precise.
4. Check the mount. Studio cards usually carry the photographer's name and town on the front or back. That gives you a place at minimum, and often a date range from the studio's operating years.
5. Compare features. The same face recurs across decades in a family collection. Put the unknowns next to the knowns and look for one feature at a time — ears, brow, jaw, hands.

If a photograph is still unidentified after all of that, it goes in scan and release: keep a digital copy in case somebody recognises it in twenty years, and let the paper go. That is a complete and honourable outcome, not an unresolved one.

The everyone-has-this test.

Family collections are full of the same image reprinted for each sibling, and of nine frames shot from the same spot within four seconds. Keep the best single print of each set. Keep a second only if it is in materially better condition, or if a different family branch has a legitimate claim to it.

For near-identical frames, judge on faces: pick the one where nobody is blinking or mid-word. Then let the rest go without ceremony. Nobody has ever regretted not keeping the eighth photograph of the same birthday cake.

What each pile needs now.

• Keep — out of the attic, into archival sleeves and a cool dark cupboard. How to store them properly →
• Restore — run each one through the triage tool before spending anything, and read what restoration costs so you know what a fair quote looks like.
• Scan & release — work out whether to scan these yourself or pay someone. This is the pile that justifies a scanner.
• Give away — one message to everyone, one list of what is available, one date after which it goes. Endless open-ended offers never resolve.
• Let go — recycling is fine. Photographic paper is not recyclable in all areas, so check locally; otherwise it is ordinary household waste, and it is not a moral failure.