As a consequence of scanning thousands of slides, I learned quite a bit about taking photos that capture a family’s life. Here’s a personal memoir, with a few lessons in taking memorable snapshots.

My father was an avid amateur photographer. He loved to take pictures, he invested in expensive cameras, and I’ve plenty of vacation memories where he had one of those cameras in hand.

But organizing the slides afterwards? Labeling them? No way. Pop threw the boxes of slides in big piles and said, “I’ll sort them after I retire.” And, in preparation for his retirement, he put all those slides into five huge boxes — the kind you’d use to ship vinyl records.

Whereupon, three days after my father formally retired in 1988, he died in his sleep.

The slides stayed with my mother. When she moved into assisted living, the boxes went into my sister’s garage. After mom died, three years ago, they came to me. The result was a huge project of scanning family slides — between 8,000 and 10,000 of them.

The primary goal was to save the photos before the media deteriorated beyond hope. It was too late in some cases. I remember Pop telling me how much cheaper Ektachrome was (compared to Kodachrome), but many of those images were as ghost-like as a half-remembered dream. Memories fade even faster. Is that a photo of my second cousin Charlotte? I’ve no idea.

For those who want practical lessons, herein you will find two categories:

• How to go about a family photo archive project (or at least how I did it) and
• Practical suggestions for taking photos that your family will treasure long after you’re gone.

This was an oddly spiritual process. We take pictures of the moments we think are valuable or important. So, in the photos he took, I saw my father’s dreams, the things he thought were beautiful, his moments of pride. And in so doing, I gained more understanding of who my parents were. …but I’ll leave that essay to another time.

I have spoken with several people who have similar family photo archives, so let me begin by describing I went about the project.

Before I began, I had an inexpensive Wolverine slide scanner but I knew a manual unit would not cut it. I bought a heavy-duty slide scanner to help me process the images. It’s a Canon CanoScan 9000F. I like it, in case you’re shopping for an affordable unit; in particular, I do not loathe the built-in software, which sets it apart from other scanners I’ve used.

The project, which took me about a year, became a background process. I could scan a box of slides while I was reading my daily morning e-mail, then clean up and share the images during moments of down-time (such as waiting for poky websites to load site statistics). Over a weekend I usually could get through five or six boxes of slides.

Scanning a box of slides had several steps, each of which became a kind of emotional triage:

• I held up a slide (in front of a desk lamp) to identify it generally and decide if it was worth scanning. In other words: Do I care about this at all? Something out-of-focus easily could be thrown away. A picture of people I didn’t care about (e.g. someone my folks met on a bus tour and never spoke with again) could be dumped, too. It soon became obvious that I didn’t need to scan tourist photos; there are just-so-many pictures you need to see of the Tower of London (which looks the same today as it did in 1972 when my parents visited) or random sunsets over random mountains.
• If the slide looked interesting, I did a fast preview scan. For instance, if my father took three pictures “just to be sure” I could choose the best image; I could throw out the ones where my brother had his eyes closed. And I could eliminate the pictures that were inherently uninteresting, by which I mean it brought me no sense of nostalgia.
• By the time I scanned an image, I was pretty committed to keeping it and sharing it with my siblings. Sometimes, if an image was entertaining or meaningful, I’d share it among my friends on Facebook.

From a box of 24–36 slides, I usually shared about 8 with my brother and sisters. By the end of the project, I’d shared 2,800 images with my siblings, and a few hundred on Facebook.

I used iPhoto to clean up the images and sort them into a de