Help! I need to organize my photos!

A friend of mine recently asked me for help. She really wants to organize her photos but feels overwhelmed. I have felt the same thing and at times still do. I thought I would share my response to her with you.

I think the key question is how do you want to organize your photos and why? How do you organize them on Flickr? By albums? Have you dated those albums? I completely understand your feeling of being overwhelmed. If it helps, what I have done is put all my electronic photos into folders by date followed by event. For example, "2009_08_28 Golden Ears Camping". So when I look at my folders of photos, I see them chronologically and I can also see the event so if I don't remember the exact date, I can still find it by what it was. Also, don’t forget to back up your photos. I have them on an external hard drive and on CDs.

My hard copy photos are half organized. From the moment I started printing photos (since I was about 18 years old) I put them chronologically in photo albums (not scrapbooked). However, I would also like to start going back to my childhood and organizing my photos because they are all over the place. It's a daunting task. Don't be discouraged! I've read several tips and such on how to go through it. The best is probably from Stacy Julian. She has a book called Photo Freedom and it's written for scrapbookers but there are lots of great tips of how to organize your photos. [I’ve talked about her on my blog before.]

If you’re thinking about how to organize your photos to scrapbook them, I highly recommend you buy the book because I couldn’t do it justice. I'll summarize the part on what to do with hard copy photos for you here.

First of all, take a deep breath before digging in.

Step 1: Gather all your photos and put them in one space.

Step 2: Sort your boxes, envelopes, bags, etc by decade. Just work with your photos as a group, not individually (not yet anyway).

Step 3: Start with one decade and sort by year. Move the boxes and envelopes around to organize by year.

You’re doing great! Keep it up!

Step 4: Focus on one year and start looking at individual prints. To make it easier, just sort them into four seasons, don’t worry too much about being exact.

Step 5: Put your photos into some type of storage. Stacey Julian uses storage binders and will put multiple photos in a photo pocket. Just remember don’t use the magnetic albums, those are so bad for your photos!

Let me know how you do!