Organising your Photos.
ARE PRINT PHOTOS STILL RELEVANT (Part 2)?
With all the focus on digital photos these days, what do we do with all those printed photos, both those we’ve created ourselves and those that we’ve inherited. These treasures capture the history of our family before the digital age. They preserve the past and the lives of our ancestors.
In the previous blog I talked about culling your photos (you just can’t keep all of them!), and labeling photos.
In this blog I want to focus on organising the print photos you have chosen to keep.
Once you have gone through your photos and worked out what you want to keep, you need to organise them in some way so that you can find them again.
1. Organise Broadly- Take a general look at the photos you have. What categories can you put them into? These initial categories will be broad. Empty the dining table and start making a pile for each category. You might even want to use a Post It note to identify each category. Some category examples could be:
o Photos from my paternal family
o Photos from my maternal family
o My childhood photos
o Photos of my spouse and children
Now focus on one category- Select one category; this would be the category that you want to prioritise. Set this aside whilst you carefully store each of the other categories in a photosafe box such as the one below. (contact me to order). Don’t be tempted to dump them back into one box, keep them in their categories, you have just done all the work of organising them!
$16.00
2. Organise Generally- Now it is time to organise your chosen category generally. Here some examples of general sorting:
o Photos from my paternal/maternal family
§ organise by generations
o My childhood photos
§ organise into life stages eg baby, toddler, school years, teen
o Photos of my spouse and children
§ organise chronologically into decades
§ organise by each child
3. Organise Specifically- You are now ready to organise specifically. In some categories you may not have many photos, so it won’t be necessary to organise further. For those larger categories, here are some specific organising examples:
o Photos from my paternal/maternal family organised into generations:
§ organise by families
§ organise by individuals
o My childhood photos in life stages
§ organise chronologically by years/months
o Photos of my spouse and children
organised into decades
§ organise chronologically by years or months
§ organise by themes- holidays, events/occasions
organised by each child
§ organise by age/life stage
Now that you have organised broadly/generally/specifically, you need to store these organised groups. I recommend the Creative Memories Power Sort Box as it offers compartments for each of your categories https://www.creativememoriesau.com/power-sort-box.html.
$49.50
In Part 3 of this series, I will talk more about safely storing your photos.
An extra tip
o When you are organising your photos you may choose to cull further.