My Christmas Present to Myself – Organizing My Physical Photos

Today is Christmas and one of the things I enjoy about the time off work and spending it with my family is having time to do things for myself too. As my Christmas present to myself, I buckled down the past two days and spent HOURS making more progress with my physical photo collection. I have been sharing here on my blog a series about how I organize my digital photos, but I have lots of physical ones that need organization too. I’m happy to report that as of this morning, my physical photos are now fully sorted!

Before yesterday, I had taken a few steps towards better physical photo organization. I had all of my physical photos gathered from all the various places around the house and consolidated onto a bookshelf in my bedroom. Therefore, if I needed to find a picture, I only had to go to one place and search through them. That alone was nice.

My next step was then to organize my photos into 3 groups: photos of mine before meeting my husband, his photos before we met, and our collective photos after we met and established our family in 2001. For this step, I’d made a good start. Using scrapbook albums, I’d started putting pictures in them, loosely arranged by decade.

I’d done this for most of Kalonji’s pictures and most of my pictures. I’d not yet started to do this for the pictures of our family (2001 and forward).  In fact, I’d actually hit a stopping point. I had the pictures in scrapbook pages (6 pockets per page) and found that I was over-concerned with trying to put the pictures in exact chronological order. Thus, if I realized I had a picture out of order, I had to shift all the pictures in the applicable decade group. If I printed out an older picture and wanted to add it, I had to shift all the pictures in the applicable decade group. The shifting became too much and it became a barrier to making progress.

So..I’ve been considering how to change my approach. At the end of last week, I watched a YouTube video that inspired me to just put them in photo boxes and group them in general chronological order. Having them in a photo box would allow me flexibility as the photos are loose and can be moved around easily, yet maintaining the approximate chronological order meets my needs to use time as the basis of my organization. I then found a blog post with a PDF printable I could use to create photo dividers. I was ready to go!

Monday and Tuesday, I then embarked on re-organizing my photos and I finished the sorting. I have 3 main groupings for storing photos – boxes for images 4×6 or smaller, a 12×12 scrapbook for photos between 4×6 and 10×13 (there are a few size exceptions) and an 11×17 portfolio to hold large pictures (e.g., 10×13, 11×14) and pictures that we have in various sizes such as what you get with a professional photoshoot.

I’ve maintained my general 3-part organization plan (my pics, Kalonji’s pics, our nuclear family pics) and I still group them by decade, though I do make some exceptions for events such as weddings, graduations. Here is a video to show you what I’ve done:

I am not yet ready to call my collection fully organized, because I have a few more steps I want to take:

• storage
  • I want to get archival-quality photo storage boxes
  • I may even get archival-quality photo boxes large enough to accommodate 5x7s and then use the scrapbook truly only for the 8x10s
  • I will get archival-quality sleeves for the larger 10x13s/11x14s (and their associated pictures) and a lay-flat box to put them in
• I want to fix all of my 4x6s and smaller onto cards with photo corners and write captions for each picture. I add metadata to ALL of my digital pictures and I want to do the same for my physical pictures
• and of course, I want to scan & digitize all of those that I’ve not yet done
• additionally, I have several very broad “groupings” of pictures, such as “1990s Misc” because I still need to go through and narrow down the years the pictures were taken. For the purposes of at least getting all of my photos sorted, I put many into this broad group if a more narrow time period (e.g., 1992-1993) was not immediately coming to me.

I am so proud to have gotten this far! This level of organization makes me ridiculously happy and I know I can still work to improve upon it. Merry Christmas to me!