At EverPresent, you’d think we would get tired of constantly going through and counting slides and photos to provide estimates for clients. It might seem like working our way through 10,000 photos and slides that have been stored in a dusty box in the attic would take forever, but that’s not the case. We have a couple tricks that we use to significantly cut down on the time it takes. Here are a couple methods:
1. Loose Photos & Slides.
If you have a lot of photos or slides lying around, stack them up and measure how tall the stack is; each inch equals approximately 100 photos or 20 slides. This is by far the most efficient way to count and has saved us hours of otherwise painstaking work.
2. Photos in Envelopes.
Many photos may have never actually been taken out of the envelopes in which they came from the camera store. If your stack of loose photos includes photos in envelopes, you can reduce your estimate to 90 photos per inch to account for the width of the envelopes themselves.
3. Photos in a Shoe Box.
On average, a shoe box holds 600 photos, with a maximum of around 900 if they are standard 4×6 prints. We know this sounds like a lot, so it may give peace of mind to fully count one shoe box first. Even though this is a rough estimate, it’s a good way to approximate a photo count, and it is a system we use successfully for giving estimates to clients. While we don’t recommend shoe boxes as the first option for storing photos, we have seen enough of them to know that almost everyone does it, and it’s helpful to know how many photos are there.
4. Photos in Albums.
We bring back a little bit of middle school math for efficiently counting photos in albums. If you know how many pages there are and roughly how many photos per page, you can easily estimate the total number of photos. All you really need is an approximation from the first couple of album pages and the total number of pages to be able to calculate about how about how many photos there are in an album.
This is a sample of just some of the methodology we use here at EverPresent to make our estimates both efficient and accurate for our clients, and now you can utilize these tips too!
HAPPY COUNTING
