The Great Photo Purge Challenge: Printed Photos Week 2 Tips | From Overwhelmed to Organized: The Great Photo Purge Challenge: Printed Photos Week 2 Tips

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

The Great Photo Purge Challenge: Printed Photos Week 2 Tips




Welcome back to the Great Photo Purge Challenge!  If you missed any of the posts from earlier in this challenge, or want a quick refresher, here they are:


Yesterday I showed you my mom's progress in purging her printed photos and shared some tips from her.   If you missed that post, click here to read it.



Today, I'm sharing ideas for organizing and storing the printed photos that you've decided to keep.

If you're still purging your collection, keep at it!  It can take awhile, depending on how large your photo collection is.  But while you're going through your photos, you can keep the ideas from this post in mind, and think about how you want to organize and store your photos when you're all finished purging.  It may help you make decisions now too.  

Steps to Organize Your Printed Photos


Which brings us to the next part of the challenge:

Step Four:  Organize your photos

There are lots of ways to organize your pictures.  Here are a few of them:

  1. A popular choice is to organize them chronologically.  Within that, you may even want to have separate albums or photo boxes for each year.  
  2. You could also choose to organize your photos by family member.  Many people have separate albums or boxes for each child.  
  3. Another alternative is to organize by events.  For example travel and vacations may be separate from day-to-day pictures.  Or photos of birthdays, weddings, and anniversaries may be kept in special albums.  
  4. School pictures are another category that some people may dedicate an album to.  
  5. Size is another consideration.  Some people keep 4x6's in certain boxes and keep larger pictures in others.  

Choose which option is best for you and your photos and then sort your pictures into the categories you've decided on.

Connected to the organizing step, is the next step:

Step Five:  Decide how you want to store your photos

Again, there are many options for storing your photos.

Of course there are various kinds of photo albums, which are popular choices.  You can get albums which fit many pictures on a page, or ones with less pictures but with places for captions.  Some are binder style and some are fixed pages.  Albums are great if you look through your photos regularly or like to have them out for other people to browse.  They are also good when you have younger children because your pictures are protected from sticky fingers.

Another option is photo boxes.  There are cardboard boxes with dividers so you can keep your photos organized within the larger box.  You can also get plastic photo boxes with smaller plastic boxes within them to help keep various categories of pictures separate.  Photo boxes usually take up less space than traditional photo albums.  One drawback though is that your photos can get mixed up if you or those you are showing your photos to are not careful.

There are other considerations for storing photos too.  You want to ensure that you store your photos in a way that will protect them from water damage (think about both the storage container and the location you store them in!).  Some storage methods also have better archival qualities than others.

Of course, you can scan all your printed photos and then only keep the digital copies.  This can take time if you're doing it yourself, or cost money if you're paying someone else to do it.  But it means you don't have to worry about storing printed photos at all (definitely good for those who have limited space!).  And you can still print photo books or display your pictures in a digital frame.

Printed Photo Organizing Tips


Each week of the challenge, I have been sharing tips I've found online to help you purge and organize your pictures.  Here are some tips for helping you organize and store your printed photos:

  • Here's an example of organizing photos chronologically, in plastic photo boxes.
Delightful Order

  • Here's an article with information about digitizing your photos.  
Mashable


  • And lastly, this post has several more tips for organizing and storing your printed photos, including some scrapbooking ideas.


Simplify 101

Your turn!


If you have lots of printed photos that you want to purge and organize, I hope you'll be part of this challenge!  Just follow along each week or jump in whenever you want!

Let me know you're joining the challenge by leaving a comment here, or on Facebook or Google+!  We'll all encourage each other along the way.

You can set whatever goal you want, based on your available time.  Just don't make it unrealistic or it will become overwhelming... and that's definitely not the goal here :)  Even if it takes you months, every little bit helps!

Remember, the point of this challenge is not to get rid of all our pictures. The goal is to take better care of our special pictures (by storing and displaying them in a way that we can enjoy them more).  And the best way to accomplish this is to get rid of all the pictures that we don't need or want.

Here are all the posts in the series.








How do you organize your photos?  Are you a chronological sorter or a sort-by-event person?  How do you store your photos?  


Happy organizing!


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