Organizing your Photos

I've talked to people who want to scrapbook, or who have started and feel completely overwhelmed every time they go to create because they're surrounded by pictures and don't know which ones to scrapbook, so I thought I'd share my system since I think it works well (for me anyway).

For each album (or series of albums), I have a photo box.

Right now, I have 5 series of albums:

Kayla
Eric
Nathalie
Family
Portraits

Since the portraits are generally 8x10, I don't actually have a box for them, I just scrapbook them as I replace them in the frames. But the other four have boxes.

The first three are pretty obvious. I have several albums for Kayla & Eric already and when I finish Nathalie's first year, I'll probably have two. I have layouts done for the family album, but I keep jumping around, so as soon as I finish Nathalie's first year, I'm going to work on finishing 2008 for my family album. In the family album, I do things like when we go camping or on a vacation, Easter, Christmas etc. I got tired of doing Christmas layouts for Kayla and for Eric and having to repeat a lot of it, so I decided family type events go into a separate album. Then I have one last album for all the portraits I've gotten done of the kids and of us. Any professional photo gets scrapbooked and put in that album (after I've changed the photo anyway). I started this because in theory if I stayed caught up in the kids albums, then I'd have to leave a space for their school photo or for their Christmas ones and that got too complicated. And then, what would I do with the picture of the kids together, so a separate album it is.

So, my photo process:

I get all my photos back and then I get organized. I have a pencil, elastics, pad of sticky notes and a bunch of bigger envelopes (I use extras from Hallmark that someone brought to a club meeting ages ago).

You can see that I hadn't ordered photos for awhile (I figured I was already behind, so why order more). Anyway, I write sorting groups on the sticky notes. The groups that I did this time were:

Kayla (to go in Kayla's album)
Eric (to go in Eric's album)
Nathalie (to go in Nathalie's album)
Family (to go in the Family album)
Then I also write the names of people I want to give photos to: my sister, cousin, mother, mother in law etc.

Then I place these stickies on the table and get ready to start sorting photos into groups.


And I start sorting the photos placing them into the large group categories.

For each group of photos that I'm giving away, I put that pile in an envelope (I often use the photo envelopes I get from Costco) and write the recipient's name on it and put them aside. This gets rid of a ton of the photos and leaves me generally with 4 main piles (Kayla, Eric, Nathalie & Family).

I take one pile at a time and divide it into layouts that I want to do with the photos. It's easiest to that now before I want to scrapbook. Then I put each pile into an envelope and label it. I'm fairly specific in my labeling system (but you just have to find what works for you). I like to scrapbook chronologically (since I'm so Type A and all that), so I scrapbook from birthday to birthday. In the top right of each envelope is a letter to represent the album (K for Kayla etc) and then the layout theme/idea. So, Kayla's birthday might be K - 8th birthday. Then at the bottom, I write the scrapbook year so I can group those together. Her 8th birthday would be in the 7-8 year (meaning from her 7th birthday to her 8th birthday; the year starts immediately after their previous birthday). For the family album, the year goes on the bottom. I also take this time to make any notes about the layout that I want to remember (ie: there is an 8x10 to go with this or a theme or possible title or the date).


Then I group all the layouts from one year and put an elastic around them and put them in the photo box.

When I go to scrapbook, I try to do a year for one kid at a time and then I'll move on to the next year or another kid or the family album (I have been mixing it up a bit lately so that I can scrapbook specific layouts for my paper pack club or my blog, but for the most part that's the way I do it). I will pull the whole year which is held together by an elastic and just start working through them as I feel motivated. Any photos that don't make it onto a layout, but that I still like go into an extra envelope and when I'm done scrapbooking their birthday, then I make a few collage pages with those extra photos.


I have found that if I can spend an hour or two organizing the photos when I get them, then I can scrapbook so much faster. If I had to look through all those photos I had in the first photo, then I think I'd never get anything done.

Wow. This is a super long post, but one I hope you find helpful!