Thursday, January 6, 2011

A picture is worth a thousand... wait, what if I have a thousand pictures?

Since I'm on a bit of an organizing streak, I figured I'd check another thing off my list. Following up after yesterday's post about de-cluttering the clothes in my attic, today I accomplished another organizing task. Sorting through a gazillion pictures from this year.
  1. I take a lot of pictures...my dad takes a lot more than me, and my brother-in-lawChristopher is a bit of a professional photographer. Needless to say, we have so many pictures in our life that it can be overwhelming at times.
  2. I'm NOT a scrap booker - not even a little bit, so getting our pictures organized and displayed is quite a challenge.
So here's what I do. Each year for the last 5 years I have printed 200 pictures for our albums. Hobby Lobby has simple black albums that I love, so I picked up 10 of them a few years ago when they were on sale and each year I fill one more with pictures from one year.
I save the 200 best digital pictures on my ipod touch and my computer, then I pull all the other pictures off of my computer and onto our external hard drive where they are stored for the rest of eternity but probably never looked at again.

But we can pull our albums off the shelf and remember, "Oh hey, remember when we were young and we took that vacation to the Smokey Mountains?"
I just finished picking the 200 pictures from 2010 that I want to print and put in our 2010 book. Let's just say, it was not an easy task sticking to 200, but I love that our albums only fit 2oo because it forces me to pick the best of the best pictures that will remind us of trips we took, people we love, and milestones in our life.

I've used MPIX.com for the last couple of years and really love the quality of the prints. They don't cost much more than walgreens prints but always look great and stay true to color! I can usually find a coupon at retailmenot.com.

How do you keep your pictures in order? Any non-scrapbooky tips?

3 comments:

April Gann said...

GREAT idea. It was my favorite thing that I learned all week. And I've read a lot. I can't even believe all that you're getting done over there...

Mo said...

Andy and I just talked about doing this. I've been 'talking' about it since Colt was born but physcially doing it. The digital world makes me have no actual pictures. It's ridic!

Unknown said...

And this is why you are a stay at home mom. But it does make me think about going through my photos. The only thing I may do is pick my photos make sure they are old to new in order and load them to a site that I can get a book made vs actual photos. That's just one more step that I don't have time for. I think I only have photos to look at from year 1 on both my kids. How awful is that! They are now 8 and 4 years old! OK, I officially feel bad and resolve that this year I will start organizing their photos for them. Thanks