We take photos of front and back in groups like the photo attached. The idea was to put the photos somewhere for easy reference. So far we don’t do anything with the photos, so shame on us. We need a super easy way to like dump photos into Dropbox or Google Drive, I think.
Since I already had a complete office at home with scanner, I actually scan front and back of every in-coming and outgoing postcard and save as a PDF. Then I capture the front only and save it as a jpeg. I post all the received on my Flickr account.
I also save them on my computer under Sent-Official and Unofficial and Recd-Official and Unofficial. The officials are labeled with the postcrossing ID like US-XXXXX sent XX-XX-XX to user name. Same with official recd cards.
The unofficials are saved as Recd XX-XX-XX fr user name and same for sent.
Under my computer files I will have a folder Sent, Unofficial, user name. So every user name I’ve sent or recd cards from has their own file. Before I send a card to a user, particularly people I’m exchanging with all the time I go to their file and I can see on one screen all the tiles with the fronts of the cards so I don’t send a duplicate.
I only keep track of “official” send and receives on a spreadsheet. The rest, I print out the address list at the time and put the dates sent and received on the sheet. When the “exchange” is complete I draw a line through it with a highlighter.
This is just me. Scanning does add a lot of time to the hobby for sure, but I like to do it and I found trying to keep track on a spreadsheet for everything didn’t work for me and took more time.
To add more craziness to it, I’ve also created an inventory of my purchased cards to be sent. Since I couldn’t easily remember which cards I purchased, I made an Excel spreadsheet showing either the name of the postcard book or subject and then one cell has key words like, “vintage” or “ocean” or “national park” etc and finally how many cards from that set and where they are stored in my office. When I want a certain type of card I do a word search and easily find all cards and where I’ve stashed them. Even when I just had a couple boxes of cards I couldn’t remember so this has helped me a lot as my collection has grown.
2 Likes