Physical Photo Organization – March 2020 Progress Update

This past week has been a hard one for my city and the surrounding region. Nashville and the Mid-Tennessee region experienced bad storms Monday night and a tornado that covered a 50-mile path along the ground. Fortunately, I and my family are okay and our neighborhood did not suffer damage. That cannot be said for other parts of the city and there has been so much damage and destruction. Twenty-five people in the region also lost their life.

When natural disasters happen, it makes me think even more about what I can do to preserve our family mementos and though I have been working on it for several years, it does feel like a never-ending process. That is to be expected – for when can we ever say we are “done.”  Yet, I am going to ensure that I establish regular check-in periods for myself so that I can stay on track. Thus, let me do a check-in on how things are going for my physical photo organization so far; next month, I’ll plan a digital photo organization check-in.

During the December holidays, I made excellent progress with my physical photos (see blog post + video) and got them fully sorted chronologically and by size. Yay me! At that point, my next planned steps were to move the photos into archival-quality containers and to affix each photo to a card so that I could write family details. Here is where I am currently at:

Archival-quality container — I purchased the Power Sort Box from Creative Memories based on a recommendation from a friend. I love this box! It holds more than 1,000 photos up to 5×7 in size. The box comes with 6 smaller compartment boxes for easier division, a few sorting tabs, and the lid also has a pocket too. I especially like the bands on both of the vertical sides of the box that keeps the lid in place – what a neat concept! It helps ensure that your photos do not fall out should the box itself get knocked off a shelf, for example.  As I put my photos in it, however, I see that I am putting too many photos into a compartment box, so I will need to put fewer in each. I will be ordering more of these Power Sort Boxes for sure; I only ordered one as a test. The box is photo-safe and is acid and lignin-free.

Dividers – the box comes with a few card sorters, but I needed more. So, a trip to Staples (because I love office supplies) was in order! There, I found packages of PVC-free, plastic divers that are 5.5 x 8.5 in size. They are too big for the compartment boxes in the Power Sort Box, but I have found it easy enough to trim them to size. My current dividers are just on regular paper and are quite flimsy. Now, I will be able to have dividers that are more sturdy, and more visually appealing too.

Photo Sleeves – I initially was going to affix each photo to card stock and use photo corners, but I decided instead to go with photo sleeves. While I looked online for some size-specific photo sleeves, I ultimately decided to just use PVC and acid-free 8.5 x 11 sheet protectors since they cost less and I will cut them to the size of each photo. This is working out well.

Which ones have been scanned? Do you know what the hardest part was about sorting all of my photos? Restraining from trying to scan every single one of them while I was doing it- ha! But, I do know that some are scanned are some are not. I wanted a way to distinguish them. For this, I created mailing labels and will affix them to the back of each photo sleeve (and thus not touching the actual picture). I archive all of my photos using Forever Storage (which I cannot rave enough about) and my family all know about and have access to my archive. Thus, the label will allow them to know at-a-glance, which ones are preserved there. The labels read “FOREVER Scanned & Archived.”

It will take me some time to now make photo sleeves and attach my Forever label, but that is my next step. I am happy with my progress so far and will do another post in a couple of months to share how it’s going!

Featured Image: Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash