Organizing Photographs #1 From Boxes to Albums

I may wind up re-ordering the numbers of this planned series of posts on the subject of organizing. I hope to cover the process from picture taking through to several different kinds of storage or output, and hope others can learn from the process and avoid making my mistakes. I worry about the loss to the future generations whose precious photos are going to be lost in digital purgatory – at least pictures that make it to print stage can be found and touched, but those poor digital photos languishing in hard drives – their owners overwhelmed and clueless about how to deal with them. That is for another post. For now I’ll deal with Photo Boxes.

I don’t know why I never used photo albums to begin with – I only had one for some of my high school years. As I accumulated pictures, I kept them in their envelopes, sometimes labeled the envelope, but kept them pretty well organized. If someone came over and we wanted to look at them, I could easily find them, they took up little space, and I would hover over the person, making sure they didn’t mix up the pictures, putting them carefully back in the right spot. If I had albums they wouldn’t match – horrors! I never liked the idea of a whole bunch of different sized albums – as it is I tried to always have matching photo boxes and wound up buying plain white…

In recent years, I found myself showing people pictures and was annoyed that my system didn’t allow for comfortably passing the pictures around.

Here is my table in the midst of the work:

Here is a box of negatives in their folders – I pulled them out from between the pages of the plastic photo sleeve binders, and stored them in the boxes. I used them to make notes of some of the dates for the photos. These negative/photo envelopes were generally dated at the time I brought them home from the developer, often with the dates of specific events recorded on the envelope. Unfortunately, when I moved the photos from the sleeves to the albums, I didn’t always take the label strip that explained the photos.

This is my photo sleeve album – I think it’s great for temporary storage of photos you plan to scrapbook later.

Here are the photos show in their 12 x 12 album page sleeves.

I recommend that you scan any photos you might want to use for any other project. I have my negatives, and I believe my digital files are a decent back up system, though I will need to keep the files and storage method current. I am fine with cutting up my original photos when I know I have digital originals. I wouldn’t do that with precious old pictures, but this works for me. My speed scrapping method is:

1. Each year gets its own album – for most albums this means making several extensions, and I will have to make a new covering for the wide end, but I like it this way.
2. The first page is a photo montage of all the pictures from that year that friends send in birth announcements or Christmas cards, perhaps a list of events from the year, on the back of that page, I put our Christmas newsletter, which includes highlights of the year and some photos from our family.
3. I gather groups of events Chronologically, including 1 – 8 photos per page, depending on the number of pictures I have, their size when cropped, the importance of the event. For example, a big party might get 2 to 4 pages depending on the number of photos, a day at the park maybe one page.
4. I have always been organized. In my collections of stuff I had saved all of my correspondence & every concert ticket stub, so I found myself locating ticket stubs, party & wedding invitations to include with certain pictures.
5. I bought a big pack of assorted 12 x 12 scrapbooking paper (usually with 2 pages of each color) and chose a color that would look nice for each 2 page spread.
6. Then I cropped and glued, leaving a spot for Journaling. Sometimes I just write captions under photos, sometimes I leave a larger area. Sometimes I used templates for 12 x 12 pages, but usually I just aimed for any nice layout that worked with my pictures.
7. For large journaling blocks, I make an appropriately sized text box in word, choose appropriate fonts and colors, and write up a story to be printed out later.
8. If it was a special event, I might include some topical stickers or paper punched accents – but generally I kept it simple. It’s far more important to me that my kids can pick up an album and see their memories, than having the perfectly accessorized scrapbook page. There will always be more to scrapbook!

I am still not sure how I want to scrapbook pictures from my life – I want to do some digital scrapbooking, but haven’t found the right software yet…

I am planning separate albums for Halloween, Our Wedding, Our Home, and each of my sons.

Timeline of Photo & Media Projects

I have always taken care of my pictures, and for many years, as part of my family history research I have always asked relatives for photos and memorabilia to share. Many times someone will pull out their box and I’ll find some priceless goodies – a stack of funeral programs, old pictures, letters.  I ask to take them home and scan them, or I just transcribe what I can.  If for some reason the person can’t let me take them home, I take a picture of the photos although that’s far from ideal.  But I now have about 5000 photos in my computer collection, and many more that I didn’t want to bother with scanning.  Below is a history of my work with pictures.

• 1997 – While helping my in-laws clean out their basement, I discover several large boxes of memorabilia from my mother in law Jean’s deceased mother. Jean doesn’t know what to do with them, and gives them to me – I sort through – send the photos out to all the relevant cousins – keeping the precious ones.
• 1998 – My father in law entrusted me with a wooden box full of his father’s photos.
• 1999 – I present my father in law with his birthday gift, my first scrapbook . I organized his photos, affixed them with gold photo corners in a plain black scrapbook album, labeled all with a gold pigment pen.
• 2000 – I present my mother in law with a matching plain black scrapbook album detailing her earliest ancestors down through to her mother’s passing. I got much fancier with this album (see pics)
• October 2001 – I interview my paternal grandmother and record it on digital video tape.
• April 2002 – iPhoto is released. I had previously used iView Media Pro to organize my digital images, but they didn’t have such cool output features, so I eventually stopped using it.
• December 2002 – Trip buys me a scanner for my birthday. It comes with a transparency adapter, and now I don’t have to keep using his scanner up in his office.
• January 2003 – My mother asks me to make a gift album for her mother in law’s 90th birthday party, rather last minute. I buy a spiral bound black page album, call her family requesting a number of specific photos of each child and grandchild (baby, childhood, teen years, marriage), have them Fed-Ex the photos to me. I organize, scan, edit and do a quickie Family History, Trip re-prints the photos at work and I put the album together fast with several autograph pages in the back (alternating with blank pages to include photos from the party). It was a big hit and I was paid nicely.
• February 2003 – my husband surprises me with the most fabulous Valentine’s Day gift ever – a new iMac!
• September 2003 – I attend my friend Sharon’s wedding, video tape it to digital video
• November 2003 – I receive an early birthday gift – my first digital camera!
• January 2004 – I make Sharon’s wedding video in iMovie and burn it to iDVD. Mailed it to her for Valentine’s Day!
• Fall 2004 – As I begin searching through the photo boxes for yet another project, I decide to transfer all photos to 3-hole punched 8 1/2 x 11″ pocket sleeves and store them in 3 ring binders. They fit in about 5 albums. I made a table in Word formatted so that each row will fit in the label pocket of the photo sleeve, and I filed the negatives in their envelopes between the pages. Not ideal – I still have to turn some pictures on their sides to store them, and store extras behind other photos in the sleeves. But it’s a big improvement over the boxes.
• October 2004 – I complete a DVD made to present to my grandmother at her 85th birthday. The interview we made has been edited in iMovie and interspersed with photos of the people and places she tells about. Following the movie portion, a chronological slideshow of family photos spans her ancestry through the current years, and includes all of the children, grandchildren, great grandchildren – I put it to some nice music – not a dry eye in the house! The cheer that rose up as that video ended will stay with me forever! I also gave her two scrapbooks – one of her Heritage and childhood, another of her children and grandchildren. In preparation, I borrowed photo albums from her house, took them out of their damaging acidic albums, went through my entire photo collection looking for pictures she might like, scanned them. Called relatives whose photos I do not have – wrangle them into mailing or delivering pictures to me.
• November 2004 – I make my mother a digital photo slideshow. In preparation I take all of her pictures and scan the good ones, then review my entire collection for pictures she would probably like on her DVD.
• May 2005 – I present my mother with her Heritage Album for Mother’s Day. It is in a 12 x 12 post bound album with plastic sleeves over each page. Much fancier than my previously made scrapbooks. (see pics)
• Summer 2005 – During my in-laws’ move, we un-earth a huge collection of slide carousels representing my father-in-law’s collection spanning the late 60′s through the 80′s. I begin organizing, locate a screen and slide projector (from freecycler) and scan over 300 of these photos.
• Winter 2005 – I give Dad (my father-in-law) a DVD, Travels with Dad (made with iDVD) – containing movies (made in iMovie) of his slide photos from several Disney Vacations, fires he photographed for the Fire Department, four wheeling in the Pinebarrens.
• January 2006 – I first learned about MemoryMiner (from their site: MemoryMiner is a digital storytelling application that lets you zero in on the stories depicted in your photos by linking them to each other based on people, places and time.) Trippy learned about it from a podcast – it won MacWorld’s Best in Show. I have found my new favorite thing. I start mapping my photos.
• February 2006 – Realizing that my children have hardly seen any of their own baby pictures, and that they hardly remember so many of the big events of their lives, I start a huge “speed scrapping” project. I am now committed to 12 x 12 albums – and of course, I buy matching plain black albums. I fully completed the years 2001 through 2003, and have made varying degrees of progress on other years. Midway through I don’t want to continue scrapping, because I want to cut up the originals, but want to scan them first…At this point all photos from 1996 to the present are in 12 x 12 albums, although for some years they are just inserted into a page sleeve, not yet scrapped.
• Spring 2006 – in preparation for a presentation of Family History to the 2nd Grade classes at Elliot’s school, I make my own Heritage album, not completed, but nearly so. The kids love it – and the presentation goes over very well.
• May 2006 – I complete my first MemoryMiner photo display of my family heritage photos. I tried to include all important photos from my direct line ancestors
• Summer 2006 – I decide to make a MemoryMiner photo montage of my life’s photos. I already a lot of photos scanned, but never went through and chose those that were meaningful to me (as I have done with my Grandmother and mother.) I start with my birth, and scan every photo I treasure right through to the days of my digital camera. My final collection includes 370 pictures. I map them, write descriptions, track down some names I’ve forgotten, and make my MemoryMiner display. I love it!
• August 2006 – I created this blog – to document my work and share the process some more.

Memory Lane, and Recollections

I’m still new to WordPress blogging.  Although it was fine for me to name my blog Memory Lane when I hosted on my own webspace, that is not the case with my blog when it is hosted by WordPress, and the only way I could find to manage both of my blogs under one Dashboard was to host them both at WordPress.  So now it’s Recollections, which is fine with me, being that a lot of what I deal with is collections – it seemed fitting.

I have something to share kind of in regard to family history, but not really.  One of my relatives (whom I’ll call Pat) called and asked me to look for some family members that may live in St. Thomas.  Pat is basically estranged from his/her father, but has had contact with other members of the father’s family.  I discovered that St. Thomas does not appear to have a working online white pages.  I made a few phone calls, did a little hunting, and quickly found another relative’s phone number in the US.  Not long after that, I had my first bad experience with contacting a “lost” family member.  I did not say anything insensitive, but it was clear that the woman who answered the phone knew quite well about the relative I mentioned in my message without my saying anything specific.  Frankly, this was all old news, and I wasn’t surprising anyone with an unknown new relative.  However, she was venomous.  I was apologetic.  I told her it was never my intent to disrupt their family or hurt her in any way. She said, “I’m not hurt, I’m very pissed off!” I tried to absorb her anger – let it go right through me – in a way I think I deserved whether I hurt her or angered her, and I wanted to let her take it out on me if she needed to.  I heard her out, she heard me out and then she hung up on me.  I called “Pat’s” mother and told her the deal, called “Pat”, and while hanging up the phone rang again and it was “Pat’s” estranged father.  He had just gotten a very angry phone call from the daughter of his ex-wife…     But he was kind, and calm, and very understanding about the whole thing.  In the end, there are no relatives that we know of to be found.  I can’t go into any more specifics, because I have to keep private things private.  (And haven’t I already done enough damage for one day?!)  I have often said that my work as a search angel has felt “protected” in a way – at least I think that because all of my searching has led to happy reunions except for one birth mother who I can’t find (though I still look every once in a while).  It makes me think that we (myself and the person on whose behalf I search) are being spared something that might hurt too much.  Maybe that’s crap I simply find more appealing than knowing that some people will just never be found.  I’d hate to think that that missing birth parent is wondering but never tried (as I have been told by nearly every found birth parent).  I can’t resist trying for a happy ending.