This article by Bonnie Joy Dewkett gives some great tips to organize your photos. We also recommend Paper Tiger Filing System Software for organizing and indexing your photos so you can find them quickly and easily when you want or need them. See also our blog article Organizing Memorabilia for Organized Living
By Bonnie Joy Dewkett
The Joyful Organizer®
Its that time of year again. The kids are back in school, and you’re trying to get back into your daily routine. As summer vacations come to an end now is the perfect time to make sure your photos end up in scrapbooks instead of shoe boxes.
We take photographs to remember the moments with our friends and family. For many, these photos end up stashed away – never to be looked at again. Here are some solutions for getting your photos in order, out of the shoeboxes, and into albums.
Start with your most recent summer or vacation photos. When you come home from vacation, decide what you want to have printed. Many people who utilize digital photography still insist on printing all of their photos. Print only the ones that you will put into an album.
Having your photos printed right away gives you the luxury of remembering the order in which events occurred. Most people want to show off their photos when they return home, not six months down the road.
Once you have selected your vacation photos and had them printed, make an appointment with yourself to put them into an album, or a scrapbook. Try to do this within one month of returning from your vacation. After all, you want to show them off right away, don’t you?
While still on vacation, write down your daily itinerary. (If you have already returned home, write down what you can remember.) At dinner each night, have your family write down their favorite moments, rides, or meals. Use these cards to help you create albums and scrapbooks. Make sure to pack index cards and pens when you go on vacation!
If you are ready to organize all of your photos, start by gathering them from all over your home. Next, discard any unwanted duplicates, blinking photos, or just plain bad shots. If you don’t want to show it off, is it worth keeping?
Then organize the remaining photos by year, child, or event. Set aside the photos you want to put into albums or scrapbooks, and purchase plastic photo storage boxes for the rest. Clearly label the contents of each box.
Some direct marketing scrapbook companies offer photo-sorting classes. Consider hosting one for your friends. This will help everyone get organized!
To ensure that scrapbooking is as easy on you as possible, keep a stockpile of materials (stickers, pages, adhesives, etc) on hand. This way when you have ten minutes you can scrapbook instead of having to take a trip out for supplies.
If you want to learn to scrapbook, fall and winter is a perfect time. When purchasing scrapbook materials look for acid and lignin free products. Products specifically designed for scrapbooking will help preserve your photos’ longevity. You no longer have to seek out a specialty scrapbook store to buy products. Scrapbooking materials are carried by large craft stores and superstores. There are also many direct marketing products available.
Digital photography is the easiest medium to store and organize. When you return home from a vacation (or at the end of the summer), upload your photos from your camera or memory card to your computer. Use only one software program to organize all of your photos. Create clearly labeled folders to separate the photos. For example, 4th of July, 2011, Maine. Once all the photos are safely stored on your computer, make sure you back them up via DVD, or an external hard drive. Take the time to delete any photos that you don’t want to keep so they don’t take up unnecessary space on your computer.
If learning to scrapbook is more than you have time for, consider creating “lazy albums” for your kids or other family members. When you order your photos, have extras created of at least one photo per event. This can be a group shot of all the people that attended, or something especially memorable from the event. Purchase albums or scrapbooks for these photos. Every time you have a set of photos developed, add your selected photo to the album. This creates an album that showcases all of life’s greatest events. These albums are great to give your kids when they leave for college. They are also great to give as gifts. If your child is creative and loves art projects, allow them to take part in creating a “lazy album”.
If organizing all of your photos is a daunting task, hire a professional organizer to assist you. Photos are often the only items we have left from life’s most important events. Keep them organized so that future generations can enjoy them!
Remember that your photos are sometimes the only item you have left after an event, vacation or visit! Take care of them so future generations may enjoy them, learn from them and hand them down through the generations.
You might name a separate Location in Paper Tiger for each set of photos, such as Vacation June 2012 or Suzy’s Wedding. This could be your main database or you could have a separate database named Photos. Then for each picture within that Location (subject of the photos), you can write on the back of the photo the number in which Paper Tiger assigns to it when you input the information into the database about each individual picture, such as who is in the pictures, where the pictures were taken and any other pertinent information so that you, your children and grandchildren, will know who or what they are 20 years from now. So the number on the back of the picture coincides with the Item Number in Paper Tiger.
Of course, if you don’t want to get that detailed, within your main database, you could have one Location for all Photos, and have an Item Name for each group of photos. In this case, the Item Name would be Vacation June 2011, and you would just input all information (general or specific) into the keyword section relating to all of the pictures in this group.
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Bonnie Joy Dewkett, CPO® is an organizing expert, author, and motivational speaker. Her company, The Joyful Organizer®, creates and implements organizational systems for the home or office. These changes allow her Customers to create calm from chaos at work and at home. Bonnie has achieved the prestigious designation of Certified Professional Organizer, CPO®, from The Board of Certification for Professional Organizers. She is a member of The National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO) and has published The Joyful Organizer’s Guide to a Joyful Move which is available on her website http://www.thejoyfulorganizer.com.
Phone: 203-731-4651
Email: Bonnie@thejoyfulorganizer.com
Twitter: @thejoyfulorg
This is awesome! Even though I have a program (Creative memories, memory manager 4.0) I didn’t think about organizing my printed photos! Thank you for this amazing tip!! It will help me find what I need in an instant. Thank you for Paper Tiger!!!
Cheryl,
Thanks so much for your comment and we are so glad that these tips are helping to get you even more organized! Paper Tiger can be used for organizing so many things! Take care, Janet