Organize my pictures-please!

If you a high techie you can do this with your photos in your computer. The good thing is you won’t have the mess on your floor and you can upload them to snapfish, or vistaprint and they will make the albums for you…..lucky dog!

Okay for my dinosaurs, don’t take this personally, let’s get started

Okay the first step in doing this task is to go in with an open mind. There is no need to keep triplicates of a photo (remember the good ole days at CVS, buy one get 2 more free), or save the picture of a neighbor you can’t recognize because their head was cut off. Why do we keep those photos anyway???? Could it be hoarding? If it’s not a perfect picture, or a perfect memory….it’s time to say…bye..bye.

Step one:

PRINT THIS PAGE and tape on the bucket for easy reference as this will take you a few days

Dump the bucket out onto the floor.

Step two:
Don’t cry, you can do this.

I find that making up albums works best if you don’t catalog them into years. Instead of saying, hey let’s look at the 1981 album, you can say “I would love to see my family history in pictures”, or let’s look at our vacations throughout the years.
I am currently making two albums for my children. One will be a family history in photos – starting with their great grandparents, through their current loves (i’m not……. getting attached…sorry inside joke). I may include old wedding pictures, birthdays, karaoke nights, proms and of course graduations. The second album will be all the trips they have gone on from Cape Cod to NYC as well as France and Greece (which I was told was an educational trip, ya right).

Step three:

Start making separate piles of people, groups of people and vacations. Remembering along the way to let go of the bad, and only keep the good. This is a very emotional process, and you really need to let go of some of the photos if they don’t have special meaning for you. I know at the kid’s b-day parties, I would have 7 pictures of them cutting the cake….really????? You only need one or two. Look at the photos as you put them into the piles, say good bye to the less than perfect…and toss..toss…toss. It will feel good. Think about it, they weren’t that important to you if they were in the bucket.
Now if you’re anything like me it may take days or weeks to go through these piles, so make sure they are in a safe place so FIDO doesn’t make lunch out of a photo of grandma.

Step four:

Once you piles are purged it is time to put them into their dedicated album. There may be a photo that you want to put into each family members book, so put a sticky on it and get it copied at CVS or Walgreens. There photo shops are very easy to use.
Michaels and Target have the best photo sections, and you can even shop online. If you’re really creative, you can even do a little scrap booking along the way.