Organizational Tip Let’s Talk Pictures
Organizational Tip Let’s Talk Pictures. The next thing to tackle is my pictures in my quest to get my life together. Good gravy, I have a billion photographs. My mother-in-law is HUGE into scrapbooking, so she has given me lots of books, pages, and stickers in hopes that I would scrap all these pictures. I have not had time.
A Few Books Already Done
In my defense, I do have a baby scrapbook for each of my children. Also, I have one large scrapbook for each of them as they have gotten older. I also have a baby scrapbook of Big Daddy that his mom made for him and one for me that I made. There is also a wedding and another random one. So I have done scrapbooks in the past. I’m just not in a season to do them regularly.
Attacking the Masses
One day, while cleaning out the masses of crap in my bedroom, I came across a drawer. The drawer has not seen the light of day in about ten years. There were MASSIVE amounts of old, loose photos just hanging out…not hurting anyone….just there. My OCD said, let’s pull out some of those scraping gifts from my sweet mother-in-law, and I will make them look fantastic. My other side feels like I have no time for this mess. Then, I shut the door and moved on. Neither side won.
Logic Wins
My logical brain sidestepped in and thought: “let’s kill two birds with one stone.” I pulled out those photos. Next, I began to separate them by the child. I put those separated piles into baggies and labeled them. Next, I pulled down my scrapping supplies, set up a card table, hollered for my two big girls, and let them at it. Was it as nice as I could have done? No, not really.
It certainly was not up to par with my pro-mother-in-law, but they stayed occupied. All my pictures are in the scrapbook with added cute things. Also, it all has my girl’s handwriting on it. I will cherish these scrapbooks forever because my girls created them. I smile every time I pull them down. These are some of my prized possessions.
Thankful for the Help
Once I got the masses of pictures done, courtesy of my girls, I found more. They were on my computer. Over time, I have added new files under my pictures section. The main file is the year, and the subfiles include things like Christmas, Family, a file for each child, pets, misc, etc. Since there are dates on 99% of my pictures, I first sorted them out, via the computer, into the proper year.
I put them in the proper subfile, and from there, I went and deleted the duplicates. I kid you not; in 2015, I had 10000 duplicate pictures. So there was a ton of space taken up by having double photos. I have not edited them because that is just not high on my “super fun” list of things to do.
It takes So Much Time.
This process takes time, but I do it at night when watching a movie or the kids are outside. I do not put any pressure on myself at all. One thing I invested in was an external hard drive. I have not only saved my pics on a CD but also on a flash drive. I put them all on my external hard drive from the flash drive. Next, I delete them off my computer. Let’s face it, computers crash. My pictures were not going to crash with them. Sorry, Charlie. Not going to happen. Not on my watch.
Big Daddy and the children love to sit down and watch me sort things out and look through these pictures. It is fun. Also, it is a conversation starter for some of my kids. Take your time. Enjoy the views and memories. Remember to save them to multiple devices and always store them in a fire-safe box or safe in case of fires!
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