Mahopac Public Library

Sorting fifty years of photographs, and other miracles

The project I had avoided for a decade took nine Saturdays, and I want to tell you how, because the same method works on any mountain of stuff. My husband's mother left us eleven boxes of photographs spanning 1951 to 2008, mixed with greeting cards, church programs, and a disconcerting number of expired coupons. The old plan was to sort them by hand, by year, by which child, and to die before finishing. The new plan had three machines in it. The phone's camera scanned each photo, a hundred a session, no perfection, just front side and any writing on the back. The chat program, shown a batch, told me what it saw, summer, a lake, four children, late fifties I would guess from the swimsuits, and its guesses were my index, typed onto folders faster than I could have written them. Where it was wrong, and it was wrong sometimes, a cousin became an aunt, I corrected it, and told it, and it remembered the family faces better after. The hard parts stayed mine. Identifying the people only a sister in law could name. Deciding which three hundred of two thousand deserved the album. The machine sorted and suggested, the way a hired student would have in 1990 if hired students had infinite patience and worked for nothing. Nine Saturdays. The albums exist now. The boxes are empty. Eleven boxes became four, one per family, with a printed label, and my husband cried over the Christmas 1966 page, which is the actual point of the whole enterprise, and worth every Saturday I did not spend avoiding it.

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