That overflowing box (or boxes) of old photos is daunting. The pile of albums, that have photos stuck to them are stacked in a corner. The idea to take those (ALL of them) photos and organize them is overwhelming. This 3 part series in September is to help you begin and hopefully finish. I am documenting the process and with some humor hope to inspire you to try and do ONE book.
I had 5 of these boxes sitting on our pool table, filled. Overwhelming and causing angst in my heart and mind. It was horrible. Then I remembered an old saying:
ONE BITE at A TIME!
Before you start snapping/scanning or sending your photos out to someone else to snap or scan let’s have a plan for the first tiny nibbles of this elephant of a project.
- YOU NEED A GOAL! I sat and just kinda perused the photos – and when the smile of memories happened I began a pile. Mine was Adak, Alaska. My dad was in Navy and we spent a few years there. It was our favorite duty station, a great bunch of memories and I thought it would be fun. Not a ton of photos, but lots of memories and my mom was great at keeping napkins, tickets and other things. My GOAL was to make a 10×10 book for my Mom of Adak.
- ACTION-DO SOMETHING The ONE pile grew and grew. I would go quickly thru albums that were not associated with Alaska and return to box. Getting those not associated with my GOAL albums boxes out of my sight was HUGE! I actually returned a huge box to my mom of photos that I was never ever going to scan. They were people I didn’t know and a time I was not living with my family. They needed to go back to owner! lol You will never ever even get close to doing this until you START!
- HAVE FUN & keep it low stress! Separate the pile into dates if possible. The hilarious part of old photos even if they have dates, that date is the date they were developed, not the date it was taken. So do the best you can and keep it easy. Sometimes setting a timer for an hour, and then stopping can help. I have an office and had them in piles on my desk. (not recommended, but it was my go to project).
Now you should have a pile of photos/extra things all associated with same theme/memory/time looking sort of like mine.
If you separate them (if possible, keep the piles very general)-you can fine tune them by pile before digitizing. At this point, I did by year and included any and all paraphernalia my mom collected. Year books, ticket stubs, newspaper articles and more.
a)1971(Seattle wait to go) b)1971 (Arrive to Adak) c)1972-life in Alaska d)1973-end of Alaska
Repeat the steps for this week:
- GOAL-set one you like
- ACTION-start making ONE pile
- HAVE FUN-no stress zone
You can do this, trust me (I am almost done and it is more and more exciting to finish). Please feel free to ask any questions or pop your process into the comments and join me again on September 10th-The chewing of that Bite-getting them into your computer!
Until then
~never lose your joy
[…] Last week, I started the process to help you get those photos digitized. You can read about the organization and GOAL process HERE. […]