Get Your Photographs Organized
Are you determined to get your photographs organized this year? For me, getting all of my family pictures organized and protected against the damages of time was something I wasn’t willing to do as a task by itself. But when I decided to start scrapbooking, there was suddenly a reason to organize and I became much more motivated to make it happen. The task didn’t get any smaller. But scrapbooking gave me a reason to sift through my boxes of memories, a reason that was much better than the mere need for organization.
Getting your photograph collection in shape for scrapbooking is a three-step process. Find a clear space to work. Next—and this might be difficult—get rid of the bad photos. Then take the good photos and put them in order. Let’s take a look at each of these steps.
Before you even drag out the first box of photographs, clear a good-sized area in which to work. Getting organized is not going to get finished in an afternoon, so you need to find a place that you don’t have to clean up every day until you’re done. For example, if you have some space in a guest bedroom, that would be great. The floor of a busy hallway would not be so great.
The next step is to start going through all of your photos and mercilessly trashing the bad ones. I don’t mean the photos of people you don’t like. The photos I’m talking about are blurred, out of focus, too dark, too bright—in general, bad photos. Will this part be a struggle for you? Really? I mean, why are you keeping them? They are really of no use to anyone, so get rid of them.
Now that you’ve pared things down to the good photos, it’s time to start putting them in order. Chronological order, that is. If you can arrange photos in the order in which events occurred, that will help your scrapbook planning immensely. Start out by putting them into piles by decade if you have to. Then within each of those stacks, gather them up by year, and then in order within each year.
Once you have them organized, go get some archival photo storage boxes, put the photos inside and label each box. A lower cost alternative is to put your pictures in Ziploc bags and then inside a normal box. The plastic bags will protect your photos from air and from any acid content in the boxes you use.
By committing some space to organizing your photos, discarding the pictures no one wants to see, and safely storing the rest, you’ll be well on your way to some truly excellent scrapbooks. And even if you don’t ever get into scrapbooking, your photos will be nicely arranged and stored, accessible to everyone in the family who wants to relive some happy memories.
