Over the years, I have taken many pictures. On a rainy afternoon, I started to sort through them so I could start putting them into albums. I was surrounded by stacks of photographs and boxes of more photographs. As I sat among the stacks of photographs I came up with the idea to take all my shoes out of my hanging shoe bag and use it to sort and store the pictures. It has worked super well and I could easily organize all my pictures and work on them when I wanted to with no stress.
By CaroleeRose from Madison, AL
These are small things we take for granted. People are really getting into genealogy and they would love nothing more than to have a picture telling them when it was taken and of whom.
By GEM from VA
Years ago, after my mother died, my siblings and I had to go through old unmarked photos trying to figure out who some of the people were and who got what photos. Having two children of my own, I didn't want them to have to go through that. I decided to create family albums for each of them. As I have always put info (names, dates, places, etc.) on the back of my prints, that part was done.
I bought a couple of new photo albums, the ones that have clear photo holders. I then divided the pictures between my children, making sure each child had many pictures of each other. I also made duplicates of extended family photos for each. I put the photos in their albums. Now I just add to them as needed. They can have them when they marry, etc. to add to their family memories.
By pdg from Davie, FL
I purchase a new memory card each January and use it throughout the year. At the end of the year I will mark the card with 2008 and put it in our fire proof safe. The memory card acts as your negatives, if your computer crashes, you will have a backup be able to replace your treasured photos
By PICO from ST PAUL, ALBERTA
Don't use those awful photo albums that have sticky pages where you press the picture onto the page. The photos will age quickly, and some you can't get off at a later time, and one of mine the pictures slid off after some years.
Contact a lady in your area that teaches creative album making and have her come to your house and teach a group of you and your friends. A nice proper album will have pages that you can write short histories about each picture. I do not sell those albums, but have been to several house demonstrations and have purchased their supplies. You can get the supplies at certain stores as well. Go to one where the saleslady knows about them and can teach you or show you a few demonstrations.
Also, there are demonstrations on You Tube, and or the Internet. This information will save your photos, as they will deteriorate over the years if you don't do them with the good archival safe photo pages. A box is good too if you don't want to use albums.
By hopeful from beautiful Salem, OR
I was cleaning out some file cabinets to sell today and happened to find a shoe box full of photos. I picked it up, the phone rang, and I sat it down. When I came back, it turns out I had set it on the rungs and holy cow if it didn't fit! Depending on the style you get, you can slide it back and forth, then you can fit two in a standard drawer, with a gap in the front or between them for your hands. It's a nice way to keep thing horizontal if you need them to be and still keep flat things underneath! Keep the lids on for dust protection or off for easy access. Great for all the things that clutter up the desk!
By Poor But Proud from Salem OR
You could make up boxes of cards for friends and relatives who are especially close or send the cards yourself. The photos won't go into a landfill or sit in a box while waiting to go into a landfill, but will instead be admired and appreciated as mementos.
By Susan from Philadelphia
I have so many photos in a one big box. What can I do to get them all organized?
Thank you.
By Debbie from Austin, TX
By Cindy S.06/03/2010I did this a few years ago. First I sat down and looked at every picture and wrote on the back WHO was in the photo and if possible, where. So many old family pictures I have we are unsure who the person is. Then I seperated them by year to the best of my ability and put them is photo storage boxes I bought at a craft store for cheap. Good luck and grab the tissues because I cried after looking at all the pictures of my kids as babies and loved ones no longer with us. But I sure felt good when that project was done!
I've always planned to get around to putting my pictures in an album, but I haven't done so yet and I think I never will. I've kept my pictures in a big bag and just recently, I looked in the bag and found that dirt, dust, and gravel had gotten into the bag (there had been construction in the apartment). I must now go through each picture and dust it off so I figured it was a good time to organize my pictures.
Do you have any suggestions on how best to organize them (by year? by subject?). What can I do besides albums? Any tips would be appreciated. Thanks.
By Carolyn
By ThriftyFun05/25/2001I think first, decide how you want to keep them.
I use the plastic photo holder pages. They're safe, and it's easy to change around the photos and the pages, or add more. I keep mine in large 3 ring binders.
As for sorting, start by separating them into years, then into subsections like: just family, picnics, holidays, vacation, and so on.
After separating by year, decide if you want them to stay by just year or by "events". You can make as many different books as you want, 3 ring
binders can be bought at dollar stores, so the cost is kept at a minimum. You can start with the earliest and work up, one year after the next. Or
decide, one book, or section (use school subject dividers), for vacation photos, one for Christmases, weddings, other holidays, one for each child (and watch em grow), one for friends, and one for just family by the year.
This way, if you need to find a picture of someone, or something, (the couple we met on vacation in Florida), you know right where to look for it.
Good luck with your project.
<p>By KayD
05/25/2001Another interesting thing to do with photos is to make a collage and frame it. I have made several and framed them in beautiful gold frames. No-one has time to sit down with a photo album in my family and besides I think that the photos of my kids are the most beautiful art work that there is to be had. I cut out each picture individually and some of the collages have over 400 photos in them. Guests stand for hours looking at them.
Does anyone have a good suggestion for cataloging photographs? I have boxes of them and would like to put them in some kind of order. Should they be chronological, by subject, etc.? Any ideas appreciated.
By Dee
By larry.107907/08/2001I like to do scrapbooks. A few years ago
I took a class in Utah and the teacher suggested that we sort our photos by occasion and then year. i.e. birthdays - 1998. Then sort by person and go from there. Even if you don't do scrapbooks, you could still put them in your photo album that way and I just use old envelopes and label what's inside.
I have tons of photos to organize and I purchased many acid free boxes. I can't figure out what would be the best way to actually utilize them and make it easy to view the pictures. So far I have only separated them by each child's name, my husband and me and one for friends and family photos. My problem is how to then organize them within. Any advice?
Julie
By phishphan9803/22/2005Separating is half the battle! Personally I would sort by date now that the separating is done. Most of the photo boxes come with some kind of index card/separator, so use those to mark what event or date it is. If you run out, which I have, regular large index cards will work too.
The last tip I leave is to work on them in baby steps. A box a day or a pile a day. I tried doing it all in one day and got discouraged and they just sat there because I didn't want to deal with it, but when I went back and I did it in small amounts I had it done in no time. Good luck!
By Julie UK03/17/2005You could attach ribbons to the top of each section with nice tags attached to the end . You could cover to boxes with contrasting fabric. Or buy a bunch of thrifty photo albums and cut out the pages to insert into your boxes.
Good luck!
Help! I am putting 40 years worth of photos into albums! What a mess, and its so difficult to categorize them; according to ages and which grandchild age to put where, when they are all together w/family. I wish we could have afforded picture albums then! I've been doing this for 2 weeks and every room of my house is messy picture piles everywhere on every table.
All of that to ask you is this; my daughter is on her 3rd marriage (and her last!) so the problem is, do you put the pictures of the children's fathers in the album too? I don't want to offend my son in law now. The mom and dad are in the pictures with the kids too. I'm trying to leave out the ones where they are standing too close, etc. But the pictures are so good! What do you do in this case?
I think my grandsons should be able to see their dads in the pictures from their *babyhood* along w/ their mom. One of the dads we don't care for, but I want to be fair to the child. I even thought of carefully cutting out his face or something lol, but I don't want to ruin the picture. Or making a private album and keeping it hidden. Then at least one day maybe the kids will get to see it, or not. I can't be the only one who this bugs. What do you do in this case?
By Pat (Guest Post)01/14/2008I gave my son an album of pictures for his thirtieth birthday. Special ones I wanted I made copies of. It helped clean out the piles.
By irtoodvs4u11/22/2007These are great ideas. I wanted to add that as the grown-up kid of a divorce and various remarriages by parents that excluding one parent may be taken as a hurt by the children involved. A child knows that he/she is the product of two parents and if one is excluded, then they child may wonder if something is wrong with them too. I would include all the photos where the children are present and also a few of just the couple.
I remember being comforted by seeing happy couple and wedding pictures of my parents as a child. It said that even if things didn't work out for them later, there was a time when my parents were happy together. If the new spouse is insecure, than I think making an album just for the kids is a great idea.
I cheated on this when I had to sort through several boxes of family pictures after grandma had a stroke. I scanned them all, sorting them into folders by family branch as I went, then burned a CD for the interested people. They can go get real "pictures" to make albums. I don't have the artistic skills.
By Noella11/21/2007I've organized pictures for my mom and for my husband when we got married. He also had about 40 years worth of pictures.
The best way, that I've found, is sort out all the pictures, first by size, square ones in one pile, rectangular ones in a pile, portraits (school, professional) in another pile. Then separate color from black and white. Then separate the curly edges from the straight edges, and block corners from rounded corners. Separate the pictures with a white border around them from the ones that don't have a border. By this time you will be able to tell which are the older pictures and which are the newer pictures. Also, note that many of the older pictures have the date printed in the border. Put the same dates together.
Once that is done, turn them all upside down and start separating by the code on the back of the picture. The newer ones might not have codes, but some will. Once they are separated by codes, then you have all the pictures from the same roll of film together and you know that those were taken around the same time, probably within a month of each other. Many of them are even numbered and dated so you can tell what order they are in. Do this with all the piles that you have. If you have any left over that don't have codes (and you will have culled the pictures quite a bit) then you can put the pictures together by backgrounds or same clothing that each person is wearing. Maybe someone took a picture of a little girl in the back yard in the morning and then again in the kitchen eating dinner. You know it was the same day because she's wearing the same clothes.
It is amazing how easy they are to put together and usually in fairly decent order using this system. You can generally tell an order by the age of the person in the picture.
I sorted my husband's pictures and did great, got them in albums in order, then his mother brought over a whole new box to go through. I had to try to insert them, in order, with the ones I'd already sorted. Then, believe it or not, his ex-wife brought over a bunch of hers and I had to do it all over again. But the system worked!
Hope this helps.
I'm overwhelmed with old photo prints, 3 or 4 generations worth. Any suggestions on sorting, and storing? I'm not a scrapbooker, but eventually, would like to do one for each of my children. I'm also into genealogy, so would like to keep that in mind for the old family photos. Thanks, y'all.
By Gloria
By marysescapades01/26/2012I'm still working on organizing my photos, but the first thing I did was label all of them with at least the year and who was in the picture. Next I sorted them by year. My friend gave me a nifty photo organizer, and it was perfect. It was just a box with dividers built into it, but it was just what I needed.
I have a digital camera now, and every time I take the photos off the camera, I rename the file with the year first, then month, then day and then who is in the picture and/or the place the photo was taken. NO photo is allowed on my computer if it hasn't been properly labeled. This philosophy keeps me from being lazy about labeling and then having to label hundreds of photos at once. On my computer I have the photos saved in folders labeled with the year, and inside those folders, I have the month folders. I save the photos in the corresponding folders.
Someday maybe I will have my scrapbooks done, but for now, it is good enough to know my photos are all labeled and sorted. Yes, I do have a backup of my photos. I'd hate to lose them.
By jehosophat jones01/25/2012I do so agree with Chloelizabeth. Label everything you can. If you've any family left, ask them. If you're lucky enough to still live in the place you were brought up, ask the villagers, some-one may know something. Even if it is only 'I think that's so-and-so' write it down, qualified as a possibility. I have a WWI photo of a man in khaki and four great-uncles it could be, or perhaps it's none of them. It would be so fascinating to know. When they've gone from memory, they're gone forever.
Marg from England.
Does anyone have a better way to store family pics? I currently have mine stored in photo albums, but over the years the clear plastic that folds over the page won't stick anymore and the pictures keep falling out. I really don't like stashing my pics away in photo boxes because they seemed so unorganized that way. I find it very enjoyable to look at pics in the photo albums when company arrives or simply alone. Any suggestions?
By Onesummer
By Pixiedust707/10/2012The best albums for prints are the kind with pockets, but not vinyl pages, as the PVC is not archival and will eventually damage the photos. A company named Century Photo makes pages of polypropylene which is safer for long term storage. There are many page formats available, for different sizes of photos, including 3x5, 4x6, 5x7, 8x10, etc. They also sell albums in different styles, sheets for negative storage, and other accessories. I really like their products, and, no, they aren't paying me to endorse them! :-) I pasted the url for their website below.
http://www.centuryphoto.com
I hope this helps. The "magnetic" pages from the 70s and 80s really were bad for our photos, so I converted my old albums to the poly-pocket type in the 90s.
By Poor But Proud04/10/2012Digitally is great, as suggested. I scan mine, then keep them in folders by person, groups, etc. They are my screen saver, and I also back them up on an external hard drive and DVDs. If you have a really great editing software like Paint.net or the one on your scanner, you can get a great quality as well as send them to others at a moment's notice.
I included a shot of my friends dog so you can see what I mean. It's a bit time consuming, but it's all worth it in the end.
I hope these all help.
By redhatterb04/09/2012I use albums that have clear vinyl pockets that hold 4x6" photos. When I have smaller photos I can put 2-3 in each pocket. I used to use the ones that sound like what you discribed and when I wanted to switch albums, I had an awful time getting some of them out, because they stuck to the pages.
I have been given 6000 photos for work and now work wants me to organize them in numerical order and find some way to catalogue them. They also want some of the photos to be placed in frames and hung around in the office. All the photos are very sentimental. If any one has ideas that would be great, I have run out of everything.
By Rickii-lee from Queensland, Australia
By deethundercloud03/10/2010This sounds like it will be a large project. Depending on what your business is willing to spend to help you get these photos organized etc. Here's some ideas: if work has a mail room, how about seeing if you can get a few of their mail sorters (these are usually made of wood but might be plastic), they have many slots which can be labeled and just as mail sorters would sort mail to go in them, you can do something similar; if that's not an option, then buy some under-the-bed shoe organizers and do it that way, if space is an issue, then use the vertical ones.
Although I don't have as many as you, I am doing something similar for my family photos I inherited, it works great by scannning through the photos so one knows what type of categories you'll need for the labels. It will also allow you to separate some and ask opinions of co workers if that's an option. As I post this, I almost wish I could be there to help, I love doing this type of work. *smile*
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Organizing Your Photos