10.21.21

We have so many fun family memories that are all boxed up.  There are some that we have taken the time to put into photo albums, while many photo albums and others are simply tossed into a box because we want to keep them but don’t know what to do with them.

Often when I am sharing some organizing tips in a presentation, people will ask me what to do with their pictures.  I give my suggestions and hope that they will take an apply them to their own collection.  But there are a million that take priority over organizing their photos.

I was recently talking with Catherine Davis from Catherine Davis Photography.  We were talking about this dilemma that many people face.  We talked about the scrapbooks that most families have made for their first child, with all intentions to make them for their other children but it just doesn’t happen.  The creativity that some people put into their scrapbooks is amazing to me!  Then, she had a wonderful suggestion.  Why not make a digital photo album of the highlights of their first 18 years!  I think that if you made a yearly scrapbook and gave all 18 of them to your child on their 18th birthday, they might feel overwhelmed and obligated to keep it.  However, a simple book of their yearly highlights might be a little easier to receive and be excited about.  There are so many places and websites available for this.  To name a few: Snapfish, Shutterfly, Chatbooks, Walgreens, CVS, Costco, Sam’s Club, Walmart and many more.

However, before you can start to create these books, you have to organize your photos.  I wanted to share a few tips with you from personal experience.   When the pandemic started, I was no longer visiting clients to help them with their organizing projects.  I had been putting off my own photo organization for quite some time and decided that it was time to tackle my project.  The first step is to gather all of your photos.  Think about the different places of your home that might have pictures tucked away in them.  Chose a room in your house that you won’t mind having messy.  Perhaps a guest room that you can close off. The next step is to put things in chronological order.  If your pictures are in albums, put them in year order. If you have individual pictures, sort them out according to year as well.  If you have several albums, put those in order from the beginning of the year to the end.  If you want to keep your pictures in albums, this is a good time to put the lose pictures in albums and to label them to keep them in order.  However, if you want to take it one step further, you could remove the pictures, discard the duplicates and blurry ones and keep only the ones that you love and put them into a photo organizing case.  I recommend using something like this case on Amazon.  It holds 1600 photos in one case!

Now that you have your photos sorted and put in date order, you can use the on-line services to create the photo books using the pictures you want to highlight for each year.

I had another client that had a closet full of family portraits.  She no longer had the wall space or the desire to display the family photos.  She asked what to do with them and I suggested the photo book idea to her as well.  The nice thing about this is that she could share detailed information about the family members in the pictures like who they were and something special about them.  Once she created this book of her ancestry, she could print several copies and share them with her family.  This  solution that takes up way less space than a closet and still honors her family.

I hope this blog gives you the incentive to gather your photos and create a sense of order with them and a way to share them with your family.  Speaking from experience, you will enjoy the trip down memory lane and feel a hugs sense of relief when the job is done! (Photos: Amazon and Free Images)