This page is about volume. One game is a two-minute job; three hundred is a project, and projects get abandoned. What follows is the method that survives contact with a shoebox.
Why the shoebox fails
Paper degrades — pencil fades, thermal copies fade faster. It is unsearchable: "that Sicilian against the tall guy" cannot be found by scanning two hundred sheets by eye. And it is fragile in the way that matters, since one flood, one move, one tidy-up ends the whole archive at once.
A digitized game is a few kilobytes of text that will open in 2050 and can be found by name in a second.
Batch it, and never plan the whole thing
The plans that fail all start with "this weekend I'll do all of it." The ones that finish do a batch at a time, where a batch is one event or one month of club games.
For each batch:
- Sort first. Put the sheets in date or round order and keep them that way.
- Photograph the whole batch in one go. Shooting is the slow part; switching between shooting and reviewing wastes the setup. How to shoot is on Photo to PGN.
- Scan each one. Double-sided sheets go up as two images in a single scan; a scan takes up to 10 images of 15 MB each (JPG, PNG or WebP), so one game is always one scan.
- Fill in the tags — event, site, date, round, both players, result. This is the step that decides whether the archive is usable in three years.
- Check the colored moves — red for illegal, amber for uncertain, as Scan chess notation explains — then export.
Fifteen minutes buys a nine-round event. At one batch a week, a three-hundred-game backlog is gone in two months — and unlike the weekend plan, this one actually happens.
Naming so that the files stay useful
2026-03-14_city-open_R5_li-wei_vs_ivanova.pgn
Date first, ISO format, so sorting by name sorts by time. Directories by year and event. If you would rather not manage files, a Lichess Study per event with one chapter per game does the same job in the browser.
Backup, which is free at this size
Two hundred games is under a megabyte of text. There is no excuse: a cloud folder that syncs, a yearly copy to an external drive, and for anything irreplaceable, a copy mailed to yourself. Your account settings also export every saved game as a single PGN in one click, which makes an off-site copy a ten-second job.
Paper stays
Digitizing is not a reason to throw away the originals — a tournament sheet is still the organizer's record in a dispute. What changes is the pressure: once the game is also a file, the paper is a backup rather than the only copy.
Related
- How to store and archive your scoresheets — the long version, including club archives
- For arbiters and organizers — doing this for a whole event
- For coaches — doing it for a squad of students
Go and get the most recent stack. Not the whole box — the most recent stack.