The Family Photo Archive
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The Archive Story
It started in 2016 with a single shoebox. Kendra had been holding onto a collection of photos since college, and I decided to scan them so we’d have digital backups. As I imported them, I started tagging the locations and estimating dates based on context clues or notes scribbled on the back. It turned into a relaxing hobby, and later that year, I started borrowing albums from my parents' house to do the same.
20,000 photos of the Catron/Struve family later, I realized this was a much bigger quest to build a comprehensive family library. Over the next several years, I inherited scrapbooks, loose prints, and aging albums from all branches of our combined family tree. A few years ago, I upgraded my software to allow for facial recognition, sparking a year-long project to put a name to every face in what was then a 150,000-image library. Add in our own 20+ years of pictures from digital cameras and phones, and the archive has grown to over 170,000 photos.
I recently completed a major milestone: sorting this massive timeline into shareable albums for specific family and friend groups. While I used to host these on big tech clouds, I’ve recently moved everything over to my own dedicated, self-hosted Immich server. I am the sole admin, which means we have complete control over our privacy. The time has finally come to share it all!
A Few Things to Note
- Privacy First: These photos live entirely on my private hardware, not in Google or Amazon’s cloud. This is strictly for our family and friends.
- Historical Preservation: For the sake of family history, I did not exclude photos of divorced family members, though I did remove romantic or couple-focused shots. If you see anything you want removed, just let me know.
- Best-Guess Metadata: Many older photos were entirely unlabeled. I used context clues to estimate dates, and ages are calculated automatically from my facial tags. You can see this information by clicking into a photo.
- Vintage Quality: Some source material, especially from the 1970s, was in rough shape. I touched up what I could, but some color issues simply cannot be fixed.
- Pardon the Dust: Sorting 170,000 photos was an arduous task, and there are bound to be mistakes. If you spot someone in your album who doesn't belong, let me know so I can correct the tag.
- A Living Archive: This is a continuous labor of love. I still have scanning to do in my downtime. When I add new batches, I leave notes at the top of the album description calling out the month and year of the newly added photos so you can easily check them out.