One of the more terrifying tasks a person can take on, akin to teaching middle schoolers, is to gather a huge mound of family photographs, slides, movies and memorabilia in the often forlorn hope of organizing it all into something reasonably coherent and enjoyable to view.

It’s not an impossible assignment, but neither is climbing Mount Everest without oxygen.

What I’m here to tell you, though, is that it can be done. Or at least, you can make progress.

I know this because I’ve done it.

Our family’s horde wasn’t so bad, in the scheme of things. Though it seemed like a gazillion photographs and a pile of slides towering higher than Katahdin, it ultimately proved, thankfully, somewhat less than that.

When I thought about it, somewhere in that heap were snapshots of everything from my parents as Depression-era children to my little brother fishing on Cape Cod. Mixed in were all sorts of old black-and-white prints of people whose identities and locations were often unclear.

But what I knew is that if they could be digitalized and safely organized, that pile would become a source of family stories and a preserve of memories that could stretch from long-ago ancestors to generations yet to come.

As a history-minded soul, that appealed to me.

What did not appeal to me was actually doing the work involved.

But I did it anyway.

All that clutter

People keep old photos in all sorts of ways. They may be in shoeboxes or those sticky old albums or scrapbooks or just jammed in drawers somewhere.

If they’re all neatly organized, sorted in some rational way and labeled, well, that’s both amazing and rare.

The first thing required is simply to hoover them all up. Get your hands on every image you can, from Grandma’s mantle to the latest series of Instagram poses by the younger set.

Sort them as best you can. Chronologically is the norm but sometimes allocating them by place can make it easier.

Don’t wait to gather up every possible shot. There is no end to that. At some point, you must begin the real work and it’s best to tackle that before your passion for the project runs dry.

It’s best to start with the oldest pictures first because they are likely to be of value to more people and may well be unknown to many who would love to see them.

The only caveat to that is that if photos don’t have scrawled description on the reverse side or maybe something written beside them in an album, it makes sense to start with anything older people in your family or circle might remember. Lean on them for their memories while you can.

Have a plan before you start

Everyone who embarks on this journey through family photos has different ideas about what they want at the end of the journey.

Some people want to reduce that heap of pictures into a handful of pretty photo books. Others want to find shots that can be framed and hung on a wall or lined up on a mantle.

And then there are people like me who want every single one of this horde of personal history scanned so that digital images can be labeled and organized on a computer.

Why I want, say, to be able to lay hands on a picture of my grandmother at age 16 with a quick search, I have no real idea. But I can do it.

You don’t have to make digital copies, but you should. I’ve lived long enough to have heard all too often that a flood, a fire or a careless mover has destroyed every image.

That can happen on a computer, too, of course, which is why everybody should have every digital file they possess backed up online and probably on an external drive as well. You can never have too many backups. There’s no reason to risk losing everything.

If you want digital copies, and you want to do it properly, you will likely need a decent scanner that can essentially take a near-perfect picture of your photographs. There are scanner-like devices for copying slides, too, if you have them.

There are apps and programs that help guide you through the work if you want, as well as professional services that will do the job for you for a hefty fee. If you’ve got the cash, that’s no doubt the easiest way to copy Grandpa’s photo albums to create digital ones.

But I’m a reporter so the idea of having spare cash is laughable. For me, the project was clearly on my shoulders.

What I did to create a family archive

I started by snatching many boxes of old slides from my parents’ closet. I knew they mostly contained shots from the time we lived in Norway – the country, not the town in Maine – because sometime when I was in high school we dragged out an old projector and looked at some of them.

Between my sister, brother and myself, any organization that may once have existed had long since vanished. The slides were jammed into trays randomly, often upside down or backwards.

I decided I would just copy all of them and then sort them.

I bought a little Kodak digital slide scanner and got to work. It wasn’t a fast process, scanning one slide at a time, but slow and steady wins the race, right?

Once I had the image on my computer — the scanner plugs into a port on your computer — I took a look at it and then labeled it as best I could.

You can use any labeling scheme you devise, but I chose to start with dates so that a computer list would be chronological. So, for example, a picture of a ski jump in Oslo might have wound up with a label such as “1964-02-xx Oslo Norway ski jump.”

With that information, I would always be able to find it by searching “ski jump” or to see it in a batch with other “Oslo” or “Norway” or “1964” photographs. If it had identifiable people in it, I would add their names to the label, too.

It’s also possible to use metadata and tagging to do much the same. I haven’t done that yet, but might someday if I ever have time, which is another way of saying I am unlikely to do that.

Eventually, I had scanned every slide, at the end of which I could view them on the computer over the entire time period, from my parents’ honeymoon to my elementary school days in Ohio.

That was kind of cool.

I could also see images easily of my four grandparents and my great grandmother who lived in Nova Scotia when I was little. There’s something special about that.

In the end, I kept every slide, organized them by date in their trays, and put them away again because the actual objects are precious, too, even if nobody is ever likely to watch them projected on a living room wall again.

Tackling photographs

It turned out, too, the slide scanner also worked wonders with old negatives. I had a lot of those as well.

I labeled them the same way and then began dealing with all the photographs I had in boxes and bags.

After much trial and error, I wound up scanning those pictures one at a time on an Epson scanner, which let me edit them one by one as the next photograph was in the works.

It takes a long time when you have thousands of pictures to deal with.

One thing I should have done better was to look at pictures of the same thing — like, for example, a kids’ birthday party – and then picked out the best and thrown out the rest. There is a limit to what’s worth saving.

I started this work at least a decade ago. I’m still at it.

But I now have nearly 200,000 pictures sorted, labeled and organized digitally — though most of them, to be fair, were digital pictures to begin with.

I still have to figure out the best way to keep the originals. I think they’ll wind up in archival boxes after a serious bid to weed through them.

It’s easier to toss out run-of-the-mill shots when you know that a digital version already exists.

Is it worth the work?

I think so.

There’s something kind of sad about huge piles of old pictures that are rarely seen and fast becoming unidentifiable as the older people who took them pass from the scene.

My parents are getting up there in their years. We just celebrated my father’s 90th birthday as a family on Cape Cod, one of our favorite places.

So I asked my dad, a retired U.S. Air Force officer who lives in Pennsylvania, what he thought about having access to these many photographs now.

“We enjoy seeing them,” Thomas Collins said last week. “Most of it is looking back and viewing your life through those pictures and seeing your family through those pictures, seeing loved ones through those pictures.”

“You can look back on your life, see your family at different stages when they’re growing, seeing when they were good and bad,” he added. “You can see old friends that you’ve forgotten about” as well as places you’ve lived or visited.

“You can relive your travels,” my dad said.

My father said that when he was young, “you were lucky if you had one or two pictures of your grandparents” and even ones with your own parents were uncommon.

Just before Christmas, somewhere in his closet, he found another batch of photographs of family and his time in the military in Vietnam, along with a scrapbook my mom kept during high school that mostly consisted of items related to his prowess on the football field.

A few of the pictures, he said, show him with his father “that I didn’t know I still had. Hadn’t seen them for a long, long time.”

“It seems like there’s always more pictures to organize,” he said.

My job is not yet done.