After years of waffling, I’ve come up with a plan for how I’m going to organize and put into albums 15 years of photographs–12 of which are sitting on drives and random computers.
I don’t know that I’ve ever mentioned that the 4th grade teacher I aide for owns a scrapbooking company. She holds scrapbooking events every month–at least I think she does–and makes special event invitations. I’ve been talking about this with her for a very long time and we’ve decided that for now, the goal is to get my pictures organized into some semblance of order. Then print, then put into albums.
Decision #1: I’ve decided to use traditional a traditional album. Everyone loves the electronic albums, but I tried it at the beginning of the year. I did very well…day 1. Then I forgot to go back, and I know that’s because all those pictures are hidden from sight on my computer and external hard-drives. I couldn’t handle it if I had boxes and boxes of pictures staring me in the face, so that I would tackle. I hope.
This means I need to start organizing pictures. BORING. I did that all last week for yearbook. Those pictures, too, were all over God’s creation, and I still have to access the ones I have on my old desktop. I have a deadline of next week, so the pressure helps. My plan is to devote my Easter vacation to organizing all my personal pictures, and I’m hoping to wrangle in a few friends to make it a party. We all have thousands of pictures on our computers, and misery loves company, so, why not have a Picture Purging party? Everyone comes over with their laptop/external hard drive/whatever and together we keep each other company while we do what we should have done years ago. Side benefit: crowd sourcing when you can’t decide which picture to keep/print.
Decisions #2: Treat instagram pictures like a completely separate entity. I’m not going to try to mix and match the two. In fact, I’ve gone completely automated when it comes to Instagram. I signed up for a Books to Me subscription and I love it. (Not a paid post–just really and truly love the company.)
Books to Me automatically takes my instagram pictures and puts them in an album. I selected the monthly account, which is $24 per month. I do wish the books came with the instagram caption included, but I can easily write it in on my own, which I plan to do. Being without captions isn’t enough for me to cancel the subscription. Here’s a video that explains the process.
Flush from my subscription ordering and decision making, I reopened my Flickr account and created albums by month and date; events; and vacations. This way, I can store my photos in one spot and send them to be printed with one click. I was so inspired by my lack of procrastination that I got started on organizing right away.
I did one picture.