One Photo. One Story. One Place to Begin.

September is Save Your Photos Month, and this year’s theme is one I absolutely love:

One Photo. One Story.

Because after years of working with photographs — first my own enormous family collection and now as a professional photo manager — I’ve learned something.

The photographs that matter aren’t always the obvious ones.

Sometimes it is the formal family portrait or the wedding photograph.

But sometimes it’s a photograph of tiger tracks with no tiger anywhere in sight.

Or a picture of your 16-year-old great-grandmother — made infinitely more interesting by what she wrote on the back.

Or a decades-old slide that lets someone see a side of his mother he had never seen before.

Or even a butterfly that stayed still just long enough for you to capture not only the butterfly, but its perfect shadow.

Every photograph doesn’t have to document a major event.

Sometimes the photograph matters because of the story that lives with it.

The Problem With “Someday”

Of course, before we can tell those stories, we have to be able to find the photographs. And that’s where things can get a little overwhelming.

Maybe you have boxes of printed photographs tucked into closets and basements. Maybe you inherited someone else’s collection and have no idea where to begin. Maybe your phone contains thousands of pictures, your computer has thousands more, and somewhere there’s an external hard drive you’re fairly certain has another decade of your life on it.

And maybe you’ve been telling yourself: Someday I’m going to organize all of this.

Here’s the good news. You don’t have to do it all today.

In fact, one of my favorite pieces of advice is:

Start small. Start well.

Choose one box.

One folder.

One group of photographs.

Or even one photograph.

Save the Photograph — But Save the Story, Too

Organizing and preserving our photographs is important. We need to make sure our digital photographs aren't scattered across devices. We need backups. We need to digitize older photographs that are fragile or irreplaceable. We need sensible file names and systems that will help us find things again.

But there’s another piece that is just as important. We need to preserve the stories.

A photograph can tell us what someone looked like. It might show us where they were or who was standing beside them. But it can't always tell us why that moment mattered. That's the part only we may know. And if we don't record it, write it down, add it to the photograph or share it with someone else, that part of the photograph can disappear.

My Challenge to You This September

Throughout Save Your Photos Month, I’m going to be sharing some of my own photographs and the stories behind them as part of #OnePhotoOneStory.

Some will be family history.

Some will have practical photo-organizing lessons hidden inside them.

Some will remind us why scanning and backing up our photographs matters.

And some will simply make me smile.

Because there isn't just one kind of photograph worth saving.

So here's my challenge to you:

Choose one photograph you love.

Now ask yourself:

What is the story someone couldn't know just by looking at it?

That's your story to save.

And that's a perfectly good place to begin.

Want to Learn How to Protect Your Photos?

The Photo Managers has put together an entire month of FREE educational events for Save Your Photos Month, covering printed and digital photo collections, organizing, preservation, family stories, backups and more.

And I’m delighted to be one of this year’s presenters! On Friday, September 4, I’ll be teaching a free Scanning Masterclass.

If you have boxes of photographs you’ve been meaning to digitize — or you’ve started scanning but aren't sure about resolution, file formats, scanning the backs, naming your files or creating a good workflow — come join me.

Scan the QR code, or click here, to see the complete Save Your Photos Month schedule and register for any of the free events.

Follow Along All September for Save Your Photos Month

I’ll also be sharing #OnePhotoOneStory throughout September on social media, along with practical ideas to help you organize, preserve, protect and share your photographs. So follow a-MAZE-ing Memories on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn.

I have a lot of photographs — and a lot of stories. 😂

But you don't need to start with a lot.

One photo. One story. One place to begin.