ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (WHAT THE TECH?) — We don’t think twice about snapping photos with a smartphone and saving them to a camera roll but it wasn’t always that way.

If you’re above the age of 30, most of your family and childhood photos are probably on paper, stored away in boxes and photo albums.

Here is how to get those photos on your phone besides just taking a photo of each one.

First, decide which photos you want to save. I make a couple of piles. Photos I want to keep as paper photos, and ones I want to digitize and throw away.

Then grab a camera app that takes multiple photos on a timer. Pro Camera is a highly rated pro camera app that allows you to take up to 20 photos with just one tap of the shutter. This not only speeds up the process but keeps the phone from moving when you tap the shutter.

Set up the phone on a tripod or between a couple of books. Grab the stack of photos you want to scan and set up sort of an assembly line.

Tap the screen and hold until the camera automatically sets focus and exposure. Then, set the timer for 7 seconds and tap the shutter. Once the photo is taken, put the next photo in place.

And keep repeating.

Google Photos and Apple’s Photo Library will detect each person’s face for organization and saves them to the cloud.

Since they’re saved, you can discard the originals, which may be the hardest thing to do in this whole process. But they’re safe, shareable.

Grab a digital photo frame and you’ll be able to do something you didn’t do before: Look at them.

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