Today, let’s talk pictures! I know many people don’t bother printing pictures anymore but if you are of a certain age, maybe you’re like ma and you’re dedicated to having tangible pictures. Or you may have old pictures just sitting in boxes.
I have at least 7 boxes of pictures in varying sizes. This weekend, I addressed all of my 4 by 6 and wallet sized prints. I grabbed some of these photo storage boxes on sale, of course, and got busy!
To the right is all of my photo storage boxes piled on the floor.
I love these because they are one large box that incapsulates a bunch of smaller boxes. I treat mine much like a file folder on a computer. I have one large box with that I have used to file all of our family pictures. For my family’s privacy, I didn’t photo my sorting process and I’m not showing the box with our pictures but I’ll walk you through the process.
One cardboard box at a time, I sorted through all of our pictures. I made piles of pictures that had each of my children alone. I made another pile for pictures with one or more of them together or with us. I was on the fence about pictures f one of use with one child. Where would you put those?
I made piles for pictures of my husband and myself alone and us together. Then piles of pictures of us with extended family and friends.
All mixed in with those pictures were various pictures I took of scenery while we were on family trips, pictures of different home improvement projects, pictures of various crafting projects and pictures from my elaborate theme parties. I made different piles for all of these.
You may not need as many piles as I did but the more pictures you have, the more piles you will need because the boxes can only hold so much. Along those lines, I have about 4 small boxes of pictures for each child. So for now, I separated their childhood pictures from their senior pictures; senior portraits, senior awards, graduation day and graduation party pictures. All the senior pictures went in one box so that I can find them easily and I promised myself that when I’m bored one day I’ll go back ad sort each child’s pictures by age. (I’ll do it! I love organizing)
I decided one large box would be all family pictures because we have so many. The second large box is miscellaneous pictures. I took all of my piles, put them in the small boxes, made labels on my Cricut, and put the labels on the boxes.
One last note: The reason I separated the family box and the miscellaneous box is because separating is not organization. You know you are organizing when you can find what you need without searching. I know if I need a picture of a child, I can grab the family box. To that end, I put the children little boxes in birth order and I put all of their boxes together. If I just put the boxes anywhere, The pictures would be hard to find.