A photo collection can have great ongoing value. As photographers, we understand the historical, emotional and commercial value of images. But the long-term maintenance of a photo collection can also be a real liability. If you want to maximize the value and life of your photography, it’s important to do some realistic planning and preparation.
In my work as a consultant, I’ve helped people on all sides of this issue – photographers with museum-quality collections and families working to preserve their visual history. I’ve advised photographers, families and institutions. In that time, several common themes have emerged. Here are some lessons from that work.
Get real
As you start your planning, you need to make sure you’re being realistic about how your work can be maintained and who can do this. You don’t want to leave an unsustainable burden to your heirs, forcing them to sort through a large collection to find what has real value. Ask yourself who will maintain the collection. Can they realistically make any money off it? Does anyone besides you know what all this stuff is? Are contracts and releases discoverable?
Maintenance is expensive
If your collection includes a substantial amount of film and prints, be aware that this can incur significant costs moving forward. Photographers may be surprised to find that even valuable collections are only desirable to universities and museums when they come with a cash endowment for curators and storage.
Digitize as much as possible
Digitizing your collection helps everyone involved. It is the best way to create an inventory of the work. It is essential for the long-term curation of the work and it makes the work accessible. Plus, it makes it much easier to add information to the images. And it can greatly reduce the cost of storing the work.
Techniques for scanning images using digital cameras are being used by individuals and institutions to digitize entire collections. Whether you are giving your personal photos to your kids or your body of work to an institution, having a digital copy of the images is the single best thing you can do to add value.
Tag as much as possible
Once you have your work digitized, it’s important to tag as much of it as possible. This includes relevant subject matter tags, for sure. And if you expect the images to be used in any kind of institutional manner, you’ll also want to add tags for rights and releases.
Split off personal work, professional work and stuff to trash
For many of us, the most valuable photos will be the personal photos we have made of family and friends. If you’d like this work to be given to your heirs, I suggest that you make it easy to find and pass along. If it’s mixed in with decades of commercial assignment work in multiple filing systems, it may be very difficult for your family to find and separate it. So you should do them the favor and prepare it yourself.
You may also have quite a bit of stuff you’ve saved over the years that should be marked for throwing away. You need to be realistic about what the value of the work is, and who is going to do the sorting.
Make a plan
So all of this sounds like a lot of work, right? Well, it is, if you want to leave things in a good, orderly, sustainable condition. I suggest making an outline of a plan and discussing it with the people who will be responsible for carrying it out. Don’t leave the entire process to be sorted out by grieving family members after you have gone.