Almost every village has one: a biscuit tin, a shoebox or a carrier bag of photographs that somebody's grandmother kept. Harvest suppers, Jubilee street parties, the old school before it became a house, the shop when it was still a shop. These pictures are a genuine local record, and they are far more fragile than they look. Prints fade, mice get into cardboard boxes, and the people who could name every face in the front row are getting older.
Digitising a collection is not difficult, but it is easy to do in a way that causes problems later. The aim is simple: make good scans, label them carefully, and keep more than one copy. If you do those three things properly, your village photographs will still be useful in fifty years.
Resolution is the thing people most often get wrong. Too low, and the photograph cannot be used for anything other than a thumbnail. Larger than needed, and you will fill hard drives for no benefit.
A flatbed scanner with a clean glass plate will handle almost everything. Dust the glass with a microfibre cloth before each session, and use a soft brush on the prints themselves. Handle photographs by the edges, with clean dry hands. Cotton gloves are worth wearing for negatives, which mark permanently at the slightest touch.
Two small warnings. Never write on the back of a photograph with a biro, because the ink will eventually press through to the image. If you must note something, write in soft pencil on the sleeve, not the print. And never use sticky tape on a photograph, however tempting the tear looks.
A folder of files called IMG_0421.jpg is a folder nobody will ever use. The filename should tell a stranger what the photograph shows, even if they have never visited your village.
Use a consistent pattern and stick to it. Something like LongMarden_1953_Coronation-Party_012.tif works well: village or parish name, year, event, then a running number. Use hyphens or underscores instead of spaces, avoid full stops in the middle, and keep to letters and numbers only. Where you know the date, write it as 1953-06-02, year first, so the files sort themselves chronologically.
If a date is a guess, say so in the catalogue rather than inventing precision. "Circa 1935" is an honest label and a useful one.
The image is only half the archive. The other half is the information that goes with it, and this is where a village project can be far better than any formal institution, because you know the people involved.
Keep a simple spreadsheet with one row per file and columns for the filename, the date, the location, the people shown, who lent the photograph, and any notes. Write down the full names where you can, including married names and maiden names, and note the nicknames people actually used. Someone searching for "Bessie Chapman" will not find her if the catalogue only says "Mrs Rudd".
Memory evenings are the quickest way to fill the gaps. Invite residents to bring their photographs to the village hall, scan them on the spot, and record the conversation as people identify faces. Make a note of the houses and trades that have disappeared, and of who is missing from the pictures, because an absence is often as telling as a crowd.
Files are lost far more often through failed drives and misplaced USB sticks than through anything dramatic. Follow the 3-2-1 rule: at least three copies, on two different types of storage, with one kept somewhere else.
Label the drives clearly and note the date of the last copy. It is worth checking the whole archive once a year: open a few files at random to make sure they still load, and replace ageing drives before they fail rather than afterwards. If the drives use an older connection type, migrate the files while you still have a machine that can read them.
An archive that nobody can see is only half alive. Once your scans are named and backed up, put a selection on the parish website, show them at the village fete, and offer a complete copy to the local record office, the county archive or the village history group. Include the spreadsheet with the images, and state clearly who holds the originals and any conditions the lenders set.
Leave the project in a state someone else can pick up. Write a short page explaining your file-naming system, where the backups live, and who to contact. That single sheet of paper is often what saves a collection when the person who started it moves away.
Combe Memo shares practical, down-to-earth guidance on local history and community memories for readers across the UK.
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