There is a particular kind of box that follows people from house to house without ever being opened. A shoebox with a rubber band round it. A padded envelope from a relative's house clearance. A carrier bag of prints that went into a cupboard years ago and has been quietly multiplying ever since. Nothing is wrong with these boxes, except that nobody looks inside them — which rather defeats the point of keeping the photographs at all.

What follows is a checklist for getting from that box to something better: albums you actually open, and labelled boxes you can find things in. It is not a project for one heroic weekend. It is a series of short, repeatable sessions.

Set up before you touch a single print

Sorting goes wrong when it happens on the floor of a spare room with no light, no bin bag and no plan. Give yourself half an hour of preparation first. You need a clear table, decent daylight or a lamp, and four containers: keep, let go, not sure, and a small tray for anything that needs a decision from somebody else. Add a soft pencil, a sharpener, sticky notes and a pen.

If you are handling very old or fragile prints, wash and dry your hands first, hold them by the edges, and keep food and drink well away. Then time-box it. Forty-five minutes is a good session. When the timer goes, stop, even mid-pile. A box that is half sorted is progress; a box abandoned after three hours of nostalgia is not.

The first pass is about speed, not judgement

Pick up one box. One. Tip it out and start moving prints into the three piles fairly briskly. The temptation is to stop at every second photograph and remember the day it was taken; do that and you will sort fourteen pictures an hour. If a print pulls you in, put it in "not sure" and keep going. You can linger over the keeps later, with a cup of tea and no timer running.

Bundling by decade or by household helps, but don't chase perfect order yet. The job of the first pass is simply to reduce volume.

What to keep, and what to let go

Keep:

• Photographs with people you can name, doing something you can describe.
• One good picture of a significant event, rather than forty average ones.
• Images that show change over time: the same front door, the same beach, the same birthday table.
• The handful of pictures other people will ask about — the ones that anchor a family story.
• Anything irreplaceable, even if it is torn, faded or slightly out of focus.

Let go, or pass on to someone who wants them:

• Near-duplicates. Keep the sharpest, best-exposed frame and release the rest.
• Blur, thumbs over the lens, everybody blinking — unless it is the only photograph of that person.
• Scenery with no one you know in it and no story you can attach to it.
• Faces you cannot name and places you cannot identify.
• Photographs of people who would rather you didn't keep them.

Two of those need a caveat. If someone has asked you not to keep a photograph of them, honour it. And if a print is the only record of a person or an event, quality matters far less than existence: keep it, write down what you know, and move on.

The awkward prints

Stuck inside an old album

Self-adhesive albums are the main offender. The pages yellow, the adhesive dries and the prints cling. Never pull. Try easing a print free with a thin plastic card, or a length of unwaxed dental floss slid behind it, working slowly from a corner — and stop the moment the surface of the print starts to lift. If you are dealing with something irreplaceable, such as an early studio portrait or a wartime photograph, leave it where it is and photograph it as it is. A conservator can advise on genuinely valuable items, and the sorting can wait.

Faces you can't place

Put them in an envelope marked "Who is this?" and ask around at the next family gathering. Give the envelope a deadline — a year, say — and then decide. Without a deadline, the mystery pile quietly becomes a fourth category and the whole system stalls.

Dates you don't know

Look for the clues in the frame: clothing, cars, hairstyles, the width of the border, whether the print is black and white, and any studio stamp on the back. "Probably 1974" is far more useful to whoever inherits the box than a blank reverse.

Label as you go — the five-second habit

This is the step most people skip, and it is the one that makes the difference between a sorted collection and a box of anonymous paper.

• Use a soft pencil, around 2B, and write along the bottom edge of the back. Pressing hard leaves ridges on the front; ballpoint ink can transfer or bleed over time.
• Record names left to right, then the date, then the place: "Anna, Tom and Beryl, Whitby, August 1989."
• Repeat the same information on the album page or on the divider card. Loose prints get separated from their context sooner or later.
• If you can't write on the back — a glossy finish, a very thin print, a card-mounted portrait — slip an acid-free paper note behind it in the sleeve, or write on the sleeve itself.
• Add the date you sorted it, such as "sorted October 2025". It tells the next person when the work was done.
• Write the label on the outside of the box, too: "Family, 1970s", "Holidays, 1985–1992".

Choosing a home: albums and boxes

Albums

Use albums for the prints you genuinely want to look at: a wedding, a childhood, one family per decade, a single memorable trip. Look for archival sleeves made from polyester, polyethylene or polypropylene. Avoid PVC, which can give off gases that damage prints over time. Leave a little breathing room so pages are not crammed, and don't feel obliged to fill every slot.

Boxes

Everything else can live in an archival box divided by decade, family or theme. Stand prints upright rather than stacking them flat in heavy piles, and keep the box somewhere cool, dry and stable — a bedroom cupboard or a shelf is better than a loft, a garage or a damp cellar. Annotate the outside. If you want digital copies for sharing, scan as you sort, but remember that scanning is not sorting; it creates another pile, this time on a hard drive.

Your first hour

Here is the whole thing reduced to one session. Put a single box on a table in decent light. Set out three containers and a pencil. Start a forty-five-minute timer. Sort what you can, label ten photographs properly, put the uncertain ones into an envelope marked with today's date, and write a label on the outside of the box. Then stop, and put the box somewhere you will see it again.

Next week, do it again. A couple of boxes a month is a sorted collection by this time next year — and a shoebox that finally gets opened.

Photo: Miray Bostancı / Pexels