Organizing your Printed Photos

Organizing photos can be one of the most difficult jobs you have when it comes to organizing and decluttering in your home.  It is mainly because photos tend to hold more memories than basic objects.  Just looking at them can cause instant emotions, that you may not have known were there.  It is hard to just toss those memories in the trash because they hold historical significance and many times just bring us joy. To compound this problem you have to organize not only your physical photos but your digital photos as well.  Each category holds its own challenges, which is why we are doing a mini-series on photo organizing.  Today, we are going to discuss the process of organizing our physical photos.

Gathering your Physical Photos

The first step we would suggest when tackling a physical photo project is to gather all of your photos into one place.  A lot of times people have photos stored in numerous locations, so following our normal process you should bring them together in one place so you can see/know just how many photos you are needing to organize.  This will also help you determine if your storage plan is practical for the number of photos you possess. 

Sorting and Evaluating your Physical Photos

Once you have all of your photos in one place, you need to begin sorting them into categories. My suggestion is to start with broad categories such as vacations, special occasions, children, family group photos, etc.  You can always break it down further if these categories end up being too big, but this is a great place to start.  Once you have everything sorted, you need to evaluate them very carefully.  You should eliminate duplicates (give them to family members if that is applicable) and get rid of any that don't have any real significance to you.  The measuring stick that I like to use is...when you first look at each picture, did it give you a positive or negative reaction...did you frown, smile, cry or think of a story?  Let those reactions guide your decisions to keep or toss, not your guilt or feeling of obligation.

Preserving your Physical Photos

Once you have gone through the photo evaluation process you will have the pictures that you want to keep and can begin determining how you want to preserve them.  You can choose to digitize them or you may want to create physical photo albums or scrapbooks with the photos. It is perfectly okay if you just want to store them. The beauty is at this point you can store them in a secure and safe photo box being sure to clearly label the categories within the box.  One suggestion I do have is that you store your photos by filing them like in a filing cabinet vs. stacking them on top of each other.  Stacking photos can cause them to stick together and ultimately damage the photo. Alright, so now that we have tackled your physical photos, make sure to check out the other posts in this series: 

Organizing your Digital Photos 

Creating your Photo Book