Photos, part two.

Yesterday I described how I store my photos to enjoy them, organize them for scrapbooking and save them for special projects.  Now we're going to skip ahead to where I store the photos at the end of the year. 

I scrapbook a bit here and there during the year, using photos from my two albums.  At the start of next year, though, I'll be ready to reuse my two photo albums for 2009 pictures...what to do with the leftovers from 2008?  Yes, I could just have more photo albums and keep adding to them.  But my goal is to keep things simple.  Two albums at a time, that's it.

I might pull out a few pictures that I know I still want to include in the previous year's scrapbook. I might pull out a few for the special accordion folder I described yesterday.  I might save a few to pass on to friends.  The rest are (gasp!) thrown away or stored in two photo boxes, sorted by (wait for it) categories.  Did I ever mention my back-up career is library science?

The box idea really began years ago, thanks to my sister Lisa.   Her oldest is about six years older than my oldest, so he was just starting school when my daughter was born.  Lisa told me to save photos of my daughter in a special box because she would be needing them for school projects and wouldn't it be great to have them set aside already?  So I did just that...and then some. 

One weekend about five or six years ago, I stayed up late sorting all my old photos, everything.  I made some category cards and divided my photos into two boxes.  I can't count all the times I've gone to these boxes and found just what I was looking for.  I made an ABC album for my mother-in-law on Mother's Day a few years ago, found everything I needed in the boxes.  I make graduation albums for my nieces as they graduate from high school and have found old photos in under five minutes. 

It does take a weekend (or more) of focused work to get these boxes together, but it really is amazing how much time (and frustration) they save later on.

I've got a little more organizing for you later this week, and a project coming up for the weekend.  Happy Tuesday!

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I think Gina is cool!

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