Photo Organization and Declutter

My goal is to have a clutter-free life where only the things I truly need and love are in my home. Well, I have always loved taking pictures, however, lately the pictures began to take over! I had fifteen or so thick photo albums and boxes full of photos and cards, and quite honestly I was not interested in holding onto them anymore. I still wanted the photos, but not the physical piles and shelves that they were overtaking. So I took them apart. I spent time pulling every picture out of every album. Then I sorted. For days. Until my room looked like this:

Super stressful right?! But, things have to get worse before they get better! I ended up purchasing a scanner off of Amazon, and it showed up and didn't work! So I sent that one back and ordered a Kodak scanner instead, which has worked beautifully. It only scans 4x6 and smaller, but that was the majority of my photos anyways. I can use my flatbed scanner for any photos that are larger.

In the past few weeks I have managed to scan every picture I had, every ticket stub, and other important items that I wanted to save. Now my goal is to finish scanning the larger photos and then start working on photo books. I would prefer to have photo books on a shelf instead of huge scrapbooks and photo albums. It will look simpler and completely uniform unlike all those bulky albums I once had. I will take you along for the process as I put all my pictures into albums and show how much nicer it will all look on my bookshelves.

How do you organize your photos? Do you have boxes full of printed photos?

Oh! For those of you concerned about losing photos on the computer, I do have them all backed up onto an external hard drive! I learned my lesson years ago :)

Have a great day everybody!

Photo Organization: Printed Photos

Remember last week when I told you I was going to be organizing my printed photos? Well I did it!

Nowadays when I print photos they usually are placed directly into scrapbooks (or at least my scrapbooking organization system) but I have a decent sized collection of photos I previously had printed for frames. I also have pictures from my childhood in this box (some of which are cut into lovely designs- yay 12 year old me!) that needed to be organized. 

Here's where all these printed photos are stored:

This box is where I store all my photos and it works well to hold on my pictures, the problem was what was happening inside...

I know. Embarrassing. There were so many pictures from every year all mixed together in one box. No organization at all. It was driving me crazy!

So first thing first, I took out all the pictures and began sorting and sorting. My main goal was to sort all of the pictures by year. I wasn't as concerned with the months pictures were taken because in some cases where I hadn't written down on the back of the pictures it was quite impossible for me to know when it was actually taken. Having them sorted into years seemed a realistic expectation of myself!

Here's more of my sorting method. I made dividers out of oaktag paper so I could keep the years separate.

I am thrilled with how this turned out! A simple bit of sorting and organization, some handmade dividers and a reused box makes for a great photo organization.

Let's do a before and after shall we?

            

 Looks so much better right?!

How do you organize your printed pictures?

Organizing Photos

One of the biggest struggles for me is organizing my pictures. Seriously.

I operate solely on my macbook meaning that every picture I take, whether it's on my phone or camera, goes through my iPhoto program. I also have Photo Stream which means all the photos I take on my phone instantly get transferred into my iPhoto. Except they don't always...

Then all my photos get out of order in iPhoto because some stream and some don't and I have to manually organize them. Which is fine, but confusing. Sometimes I take pictures for the blog I won't need again (organization projects, couponing hauls..) so I can delete them once I'm done with them. Other pictures I save forever so I need to make sure those photos are all separate.

I print some pictures for scrapbooking and others for frames. Some pictures never get printed and live forever on my computer. I back them all up to a photo sharing site as well as on my external hard drive.  

The pictures that are printed and not in a scrapbook or a frame are left in a box in my closet- completely unorganized. Seriously, it's one of my biggest shameful moments looking into that box!

So. That's my photo un-organization story. Now, I just need to come up with a plan on how to organize it all. Over the next couple of weeks I'm going to organize all of my printed photos in that box as well as come up with a way to organize all of the photos I have in iPhoto and I'm taking you along with me!

How do you organize your photos?