New project

I started organizing some photos yesterday. I am taking an online class called Yesterday and Today from Big Picture Scrapbooking which involves using older photos from my childhood. This isn't too hard since there is no shortage of these types of pictures as I was a first child and my grandfather was a professional photographer. It did take some digging to find some specific photos I was looking for...hence the catalyst for the major reorganization. I have gone through phases of photo storage and as a result I have a wide variety of systems in place. Photo boxes, photo albums, photo disks and over the past year a giant pile of picture packages. For a girl who took over 3000 pictures over the past 12 months this just ain't cuttin' it.

So. Now it's time to streamline the systems. I am a little nervous about the sheer volume of photos now residing on my table. This brings me to the first change I am going to make. I do not have to print every photo I upload. I upload photos in order to share with family and friends and automatically just print them. My scrapbooking mindset is that I will print them and have them ready when I have time to scrapbook. But now I'm too overwhelmed with photos to scrapbook...can you see where this is going? So starting now, the photo disk will be my friend. And I am looking into possibly moving towards printing at home as this would likely be cheaper and for sure more convenient.

The next thing I'm going to do is get some of these. I can store the picture packs I have in these according to date. I have decided to leave the photo albums that I have filled in various phases intact, even though it is an interruption in my process. Embracing this will allow me to move forward and spend less money on new storage. And besides, the kids really enjoy looking at these. I may fill a new album per year with "highlights" so we can look at these periodically.

For the older photos I have, I am looking into these. I feel this is more protective and easier to access. I will be scanning in some of these photos, so will have some saved to a disk, but in general, the copies we have are the only one with the negatives who knows where.

I think it's pretty funny that the longest non-photo post I've ever written is on the subject of photo storage :) I'll keep you updated on the progress...I'm hoping this will inspire me to scrapbook more once it's done.