Organizing Old Photos In Numbered Albums: a house log
Perhaps it is the whole organize-everything-because-it is-spring thing or even a bit of last minute nesting, but lately I have been all about whipping things into submission. As in, finding a place for every last paperclip and utensil… even putting every single one of our photos into coordinated leather albums and chronologically numbering them. Yeah, it is a little crazy but I have consistently been a nerd for organization. And looking at those pleasant little hand-numbered tags simply makes me smile. It is the little things, right?
The first stage of the project was to go through all my mismatched old falling-apart albums (and stacks of sad album-less photos) and put them all in chronological order. Then I grabbed some pleasant-sufficient-but-not-bank-breaking albums from Target and filled ’em up. I could have stopped there but I wondered if they might be hard to differentiate and sift through since they are all so similar looking (which I like for consistency, but it is not as straightforward to remember as “the moving photos are in the yellow sunflower album”).
And so the idea of numbering the albums was born…
One trip to Office Max and a few dollars later I came home with these metal-rimmed white labels. They in fact were meant for labeling valet keys or something (so I took out the little key loops) but the loops would in fact be handy for hanging them off of baskets in a linen closet. Gotta enjoy a multitasking accessory like that.
Anyway, I simply scribbled a number on each one using a regular old ballpoint pen and relied on a loop of scotch tape to secure them to each album (a dot of Liquid Nails would likely hold them in place even more securely). What do you think? Does it make you want to slap me? Or does it make you want to organize something? I am one of those people who watches other people clean their house on TV and immediately wants to clean mine. Here is hoping my obsessive organizing rubs off on a few keen storage freaks like me!
And since many people write to us to ask how we organize and store our photos on the computer along with our hard copies, here is more info in that regard. We keep a folder for each month on the computer (since all of our pics are digital) and we dump them into the right month as we take them. Then every few months we go thought a few months at a time and pick the ones we enjoy and get them printed at CVS on the low-cost and stick them (chronologically) in our newly-matched-and-numbered albums. Then we toss the rest into the computer trash and hit “empty.” We certainly like editing down our photos (instead of printing every single one that we take). And burning the remaining photos that we thought were good sufficient to print at the end of the year on a CD labeled as “Photos 2009” gives us a pleasant little photo backup system that is straightforward to maintain (we are left with one small CD of annual pics to store in our fireproof safe, while the identical CVS prints are displayed in our numbered albums).
So that is what works for us. And speaking of organization, what have you folks corralled or chronologically arranged lately? Any junk-drawer-clean-outs going on? What about paring down clothes or donating all those unused cans of food in the backs of your kitchen cabinets? Do tell. You know we live vicariously through you folks, right?
Psst- Wanna see other “Straightforward Upgrades” we have implemented? Here is one and here is another.
