This final part on organizing photos will deal with the actual prints themselves. Like many scrappers, I have a lot of photos. In fact, I’m quite sure that I have more photos than I could even scrap in my lifetime… and I don’t even have kids, yet. So how do we go about organizing them. I have found two options.
- 1. Organizing by event and theme.
For photos, especially travel photos, I organize them as soon as I get them home. I divide them by event or by city. If I have a lot of photos from one city, then I will often subdivide it so each site gets it’s own envelope. On the outside of the envelope I put all the relevant details, include names (people and places) and dates. I will often also jot down small notes of the events and place those notes inside the envelope for use on later journalling. These then get filed in boxes, usually in chronological order. For the photos I have, this works well for me.
You can also do the same thing with photo boxes, using index cards to divide your major events/dates.
- 2. Using a photo album to organize.
For those people with children/families, this is a great option. When you get your photos back from the lab, simply place the photos in a traditional (but safe) photo album. You can always jot down journalling notes and place them behind the photos. This nice thing about this method is that your family and friends can see your photos, even if they haven’t been scrapped yet, and you just take the photos out as you wish to scrap them.
No matter what method you choose, I think the most important thing is to make sure that the name of the event/place/people and the date appear with your photo, whether it be on the back of the photo, or on an adjacent journalling card. This way, even if the photos never get scrapped, future generations will know what the photo is about.