Family photo album: how to organise it and share it privately

Every family has a photo album, but it rarely sits in one place. Some photos are on your phone, some on your brother's laptop, some in a shoebox in a drawer at your parents', and some on a CD from 2004 that nobody has opened since. A family photo album that the whole family can enjoy starts with bringing those pieces together, putting them in an order that lasts, and then sharing them privately with the people who belong in it.

This guide goes through it step by step, then compares the ways to share a private family photo album.

Step 1: gather everything before you sort

First collect, then sort, so you only sort once. Look in these places:

• Phones, yours and the old ones in drawers. Charge them and copy the photos off before the batteries give up.
• Old computers and external drives, including the family laptop nobody uses any more.
• CDs, DVDs and memory cards from digital cameras of the 2000s.
• Paper prints, albums and slides, often the oldest and most precious part.
• Relatives. Ask brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles. Send one short message: which photos do you have from before 2000? Many families find that the best photo of a grandparent is with a cousin.

Copy everything into one folder on one computer, with a second copy on an external drive. Do not sort yet.

Step 2: digitise the paper prints

Paper prints are the part of the album that cannot be copied by a click. You have three options: scan them yourself on a flatbed scanner, photograph them with your phone in good, even daylight, or send them to a scanning service. Our guide scan, photograph or outsource compares the three. Before you digitise, write down anything on the back of a print: a date, a name, a place. That writing is often the only source you will ever have.

Step 3: cull duplicates and blurry shots

A good album is smaller than the pile it came from. Remove exact duplicates, the ten nearly identical shots of the same moment (keep the best one), and the photos that are blurred, dark or of nothing in particular. Be careful with old photos: a blurry picture may be the only one of a great-grandmother. When in doubt, keep it in a separate folder rather than deleting it.

Step 4: a folder and file-name scheme that lasts

Use a scheme that still works in twenty years, on any computer. The simplest one is year-month-event:

• Folders per year: 1965, 1966, 1967.
• Inside, one folder per event: 1987-06 Wedding Anna and Tom.
• File names that start with the date: 1987-06-14 Anna Tom church.jpg.

Because the date comes first, files sort themselves in the right order. For a photo with an unknown date, use the decade and a question mark in the name, for example 196x. Our guide to organising old family photos digitally goes deeper into folders and tags.

Step 5: a name and a year on every photo

This is the step that makes a pile of files into a family album. For every photo, write down who is in it, from left to right, and the year. Add a place and one sentence if you know it. You can put this in the file name, in a caption, or in a simple list next to the folder. A photo without names becomes a photo of strangers within one generation.

Missing a date? The free photo date tool reads the date taken from digital photos and has a checklist for paper prints: clothing, cars, the photo paper, the border. Our guide on dating an old photograph and identifying the people in it helps with the hard cases.

Step 6: find the missing years

Most family albums have holes: the years a child was small and nobody printed anything, or the years of the first digital cameras. The free Timeline tool reads the date taken of your digital photos and shows them per year, so the missing years stand out. Nothing is uploaded. Once you see the gaps, you know whom to ask. If your photos are in Google Photos, read Google Photos and family history first.

Step 7: choose one main structure

There are three good ways to arrange a family album. Pick one as the main order:

• By year. Simple and clear. Best when the album is mainly about one family of parents and children.
• By family branch. Your father's side, your mother's side. Best when several families meet in one album.
• By person. A section per grandparent, parent or child. Best for telling lives.

Within a branch or a person, keep the photos in order of year.

Sharing a family photo album privately: the options

Once the album is in order, you want to share it with relatives, and only with them. Each option has strengths:

• Shared albums in Google Photos or iCloud Shared Albums. Easy, and good for recent photos from everyone's phones. Less good for context: names, years and stories get lost, and old photos sit among thousands of new ones. Some shared albums store smaller copies.
• A shared cloud folder. Keeps your folder and file-name scheme exactly as it is. But it is a list of files, not something relatives enjoy browsing.
• A family group chat. Everyone sees it at once. But chats usually compress photos, and anything older than last week gets lost in the scroll.
• A private family memory app. Built for photos with names, years and stories, and for deciding who in the family sees what.

Whatever you choose, check five things: is it private by default, who can add photos, who can see which part, can you take everything out again in a full export, and where is the data stored. Our comparison sharing family photos privately goes through the options in more detail.

The privacy of your relatives

A family album is full of other people. Ask before you share photos of living relatives, and be extra careful with children. Never post family photos publicly without asking the people in them. Our guide on sharing old family photos online: copyright and privacy explains what to watch out for.

How The Memory Palace works as a private family album

The Memory Palace is a private 3D palace with a hall, wings and rooms that you walk through, on iPhone, iPad, Android and in the browser, in five languages. Data is stored in the EU.

• Rooms per person or period. For example a wing per family branch and a room per grandparent, couple or decade. You decide.
• Photos on the walls. Every photo hangs in a frame, with a name and a year underneath. Videos, letters and documents can go in too.
• Relatives add their photos. Wings and rooms are private by default. You invite people into a room or a wing, and they can add their own photos, stories and voice recordings there.
• Voices next to photos. Record who it was in your own voice, or add an existing recording.
• Legacy. Under Settings, Legacy you choose who receives which wings or rooms, and when.
• Export. A full export as a ZIP file at any time, also on the free plan.

It does not print books and is not a backup of every photo on your phone. It is for the photos you want the family to understand. Walk through an example palace, no account needed.

Related guides

• How to organise old family photos digitally
• Family memory book: digital or printed?
• Sharing family photos privately: the options compared