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.

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