Photo Storage and Organization

My husband and son are at a father-son campout this weekend, so I just devoted my entire day - literally about 10 hours straight to organizing our photos. Now normally, I wouldn't advise a client to tackle such a large and time-consuming project. But I know myself and my schedule and believe me, large blocks of spare time are a pretty rare thing in my life. And I also know that with a semi-unpleasant job like this, my best bet is to do it in one large chunk because otherwise I can let a project like this drag out for weeks.

In my house, photos and other personal mementos are probably my largest source of clutter. I'm pretty sentimental and over the years I have amassed a pretty extensive collection of "stuff". Not only pictures, but craft items my mother made for me and my children, clothes that have particular significance, birth announcements and certificates for variance achievements, report cards, etc.

It's a LOT of stuff and it takes up a fair amount of space in my house. But because a lot of it has meaning to me, I am willing to forgo other types of clutter to make room for it. I have it all in a large cedar chest that my mother bought me when I was in college and I have three large Rubbermaid tubs that fit neatly into the closets in several rooms. So, even though it is technically clutter, it is fairly neat and pretty organized clutter.

However, I have decided to take it a step further. I like to scrapbook and I am on the verge of digging into digital scrapbooking, so I need my pictures converted to digital format for scrapbooking. Plus I am nervous something could happen to ruin all these special memories for me, so I have found a place that converts them to digital images on CD. It's not a bad deal. You send them a box of approximately 1,000 photos, sorted by size and organized the way you want them, and for $50 they scan them and send them back to you on CD. The place is called Scanmyphotos.com and they're based in Irvine, CA. That's important because some of these places send your pictures off to India or China for scanning and that makes me nervous.

Anyway, that sounded like a pretty good option at about 9:00 this morning. The problem is that I think I've got a lot more than 1,000 photos. I haven't counted yet, but I'll bet it's in the neighborhood of 5,000! Yikes! I don't know if I'm up for spending that kind of money to get all those pictures scanned. We'll see when I'm all done and have a chance to count the photos. I may have to pick and choose and only scan my most favorite ones. Plus I'm not sure what to do with them once they're scanned. 1,000 photos is a lot more than my poor computer can handle. I'd have to find some kind of an on-line picture storing and organizing place. Sounds like I need a bit more research.

But in the meantime, I am definitely accomplishing something. I got all of our oldest pictures out of those old-style magnetic albums that were ruining them. That was a heck of a job right there, I'll tell you! I've also gotten all the old pictures out of their individual envelopes and gotten them all sorted by size if I do decide to scan them. And I've weeded out all the negatives and thrown away all the paper envelopes that were taking up a lot of room. Yes, I hear you gasp, but I know perfectly well that I'd never go back and go to all the trouble of figuring out negatives to get reprints of anything made from them. And besides, the last thing I need is MORE pictures, so I felt comfortable in decluttering them. Duplicates too! Lord in heaven, who ever came up with that particular marketing scheme?

I've also made some progress in getting some of the larger stuff organized - pictures in larger frames, report cards, envelopes of the kid's school pictures. I'm hoping that by the time I'm done, I may be able to eliminate one of the Rubbermaid tubs. Then I just need to figure out what to do with the actual pictures. I'm torn between keeping them in those shoebox-style photo boxes, or putting them into large photo albums, the kind with slip-in sleeves. The boxes hold more, but they're easier to use for scrapbooking when you can see them all laid out in the flat albums.

This is one instance where I could use some good advice. What great strategies to you have for keeping track of your pictures and keeping them organized?

I'm participating in the Photo Storage challenge over at Organizing Junkie. Click the link to pop over and find more ideas on photo storage.