As promised in my monthly Heritage Makers e-mail message, I will start sharing my process for organizing my old photographs. My goal is to sort and scan all my old photos -- not just of me and Brian and the kids -- but going back into my childhood and my parents lives before I came to be, as well. It's an ambitious project, but I'm pretty confident that if I just keep plugging away at it, it will all get done. Hopefully before the end of the year!
The first thing I've done is to gather all my photos into one place. For me, it's Brian's office. Sorry, honey! I've got my shoe boxes filled with old photos, old scrapbooks, old magnetic albums, the kids school files from over the years... you name it, it's all in this room. For me, I can't begin to organize until I have a full scope of the project. I'm sure I'll find other photos tucked away in odd drawers over time, but for now, I'm putting everything I know I've got into one room.
From there, I'm taking each item, piece by piece. I started with my old albums. Most are already chronological in order, so this was an easy way to begin. I'm taking each photo out of it's sleeve and putting it in a pile according to the year it was taken. I have little post-its to mark each pile with the year. I'm methodically doing this with all of the albums. When I get a bit bored, I go back into each "year" pile and start sorting by month. I'm not trying to be perfect, and as the kids have gotten older, the exact months don't matter quite as much as they did when they were babies and were growing so quickly. But I am trying to get as close as possible. Even if I break a year down into quarters, I'm doing pretty good at narrowing the photos down to their perspective places in history.
When I'm done with the albums, I'll start in on the shoe boxes. I've organized my photos in so many different ways over the years, that in my shoe boxes, my photos tend to be organized by categories, like "vacations," "Christmas," "Cousins," etc. I'll take the photos out of the boxes and start adding them to the "year" piles I've started. I'm not so worried about the categories right now, because once they are all scanned into my computer by date, I can tag them with categories.
As I'm going through my photos, there are certainly those that I'm not quite sure what year, let alone month, they were taken. I'm putting them to the side for now. I'm finding that as I go, I come across a photo that has already been marked with a date and I know that I can connect it to one of the photos in my "unknown" pile. At the end, I'm hoping this "unknown" pile shrinks down and I can then spend the time to ask other people if they happen to know when some of these photos were taken.
All the time I'm doing this, I'm getting rid of dead weight. You know what I'm talking about. Those pictures that we hold onto for no apparent reason. The blurry ones. The duplicates. The ones that make you look bad and hate looking at anyways! Now is the time to file them in the trash can and never look back. It can be tough to let go of some of them, but trust me, you'll feel better when you do!
That's about where I am right now in my own process. When I'm bored with it, I sometimes switch to organizing my digital photos on my computer. I'll save how I'm doing that for a future post.
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