Help with Organizing Family photos...please Tell Me How You Do It?!?!

Hi Christi,
With all the digital photos that we take I gave up on developing pictures a long time ago.
I made an album for each child of their first year only. Also, once a year I go to Picture People to do professional photos. I put those in their album also.
As far as the rest of the pictures, I upload them to Shutterfly.com and I have set up albums there. I organize them by year and time of the year, for example 2008 Summer, 2008 Spring etc. I also set up albums for special occasions, like 2008 Son's birthday, 2008 Summer vacation etc.
It took me a while to upload and organize all the photos in the beginning, but now I upload new ones every couple of months or so and it's easy.
I love having them on-line because anyone, anywhere can look at them. I have family in Europe, I just gave them the web address and password, they can look at the pictures any time they want.
Albums at home are not this practical, you can't show them to everybody, they just lay there....

I also keep a copy on my computer and also on a CD, just as a backup in case I loose one or the other....

I started organizing on my computer, set up the folders, albums, dated them. Once I had all the photos organized there, I tranferred to Shutterfly and made a copy on CD.
Now, when I do update I do the same, first organize on the computer, then send to shutterfly and CD...

I have the same dilema.....when my eldest son died, it took me quite a bit of sorting to get photos of just him or where he was the main focus out of the pile.

I have started by sorting the pictures into plastic bags for each child and a bag that contains pictures that include all 4 that i feel should be included for each of them. I have purchased expandable photo/scrapbook albums for each and have begun to sort each child's pictures in order by age (ie: newborn to 1st birthday, up thru the newest pics of each)....by having an expandable album it can grow as they grow, and the scrapbook pages only limit me to photos that are 12 by 12 so the 8x10's can be included.

Like you I see this as an overwhelming task...but I think I am on track. I also thought about scanning them and putting them on a DVD, but decided that since our technology is constantly changing (look at the VHS tapes many of us have that are no longer relevant as a good storage media) that real paper photos would be best and maybe I will back them up with a DVD that i can place in a pocket in the book. I think the point is that when the children grow up, they will want to see these pictures....books are still around and I don't see them ever really disappearing entirely, so...hard copy books for each child are my plan. Of course I intend to include the "group" pictures for each child so that they have record of their siblings as well..

I have started the first album and began with a few pictures of myself and my children's father as we were growing up and have set aside pictures of other ancestors ( my great grandmother, his grandparents, etc) ...I made copies for each of them.... that I feel should be included...nothing tells me more about who I am than looking at what influenced me throughout my lifetime and of course, that includes the family that influenced my parents.

Don't think you should accomplish this in one afternoon/evening......think about it. Set aside a box that you can sort thru bit by bit...it can be fun to look thru the photos and relaxing. Keep it interesting, share it with your kids...and then decide if you want to complete the album(s) 1 by 1, or let them each begin and grow bit by bit. If your kids are old enough to help, you may find this a fun family project. With out the "creative" scrapbook stigma, remember to include captions, narratives or other things that will help tie your memories of the time with the photos you select. By having the kids help, they can include information like who the children attending their 6th birthday party are!..I know I can't remember the other children's names...but my daughter did!

One of my son's will be getting married this year....I have a goal of getting his album completed before the wedding, his fiance has been great about helping me sort his pictures and put them in order....I think I will make a copy of the finished album for myself and give him the original. I'm sure it will serve as a fine memory piece of his childhood for both of us.

I am a creative memories consultant and most of us consultants will sit with you one on one your home or ours- I live in Cary IL or you could find a consultant near you- creativememories.com. I always recommend starting with your most current pictures and moving forward- (I am current for the last 8 years on my pictures- but have 30 years before that to put in albums). The one reason I got started with Creative memories is because I met my upline at a garage sale and she had her albums- just pictures and journaling- nothing else. If that doesnt work for you there are albums with area to write on. Good luck! Your kids are so lucky! I wish my mom would have pictures organized for me!

I also have a lot of existing photos in boxes that I need to go through to get rid of a bunch of them. But for ongoing stuff, I use Shutterfly to do at least a couple of photo books every year of our highlights. I also have had some luck with buying big albums with photo pockets (rather than sticky pages) and just shoving photos in there and labeling by year.

I also can't scrapbook, although I enjoy the creativity of creating a digital photo book for my mother and one for my mother-in-law every year. On Shutterfly, there are a lot of fun options. For example, you can combine text with pictures to make a story book ("when grandma came to visit") or a recipe book or whatever you want.

Shutterfly also lets you create a "shared site" where you can post and share photos with your family. The sites are super-easy to work with and you can add web parts for surveys, notes, links to other sites, all kinds of fun things. (as you can tell, I'm a big Shutterfly user!)

My pictures are all organized by date. I do put together scrapbooks for each of my kids, but that is separate from our family photo albumb.

Once you've gotten them in an album, it's real easy to keep it up. I download my pictures once a month from my digital camera, pick the best ones and use an internet photo processing service (winkflash) to print them for me. It takes about a week to get them back but who cares? I've already seen the photos and it's much cheaper than Wal-Mart. I usually spend $10 a month on printing pictures.

I create an album or two depending on how many pictures I take in a year and place the pictures in order as they happen in the year. I get the albums that hold 4x6 pictures and have a small space to the side of the photo for journalling or to add a little sticker or decoration to the page. I don't have a lot of time for scrapbooking so adding a small stickers, a small picture from a travel brochure, etc. and a short journal entry giving a short description of the photo serves its purpose. I don't add a journal entry for every picture but I do add a sticker or some decoration to each page to make it interesting. I have been creating these albums since my kids were born and now they are 12 (I have twins). When they turned 10 I created an album for each of them with a collection of pictures of events from their first 10 years. This will be the album they take with them when they are grown up and move away from the nest. They absolutely loved it!!! I have the albums on a book shelf in our familyroom and from time to time they go and get a book off the shelf and want to look at it together to remember a particular year or family vacation. Since I usually take a lot of pictures on a family vacation there is usually one album dedicated to that vacation. Michaels is a good place to pick up stickers and they have a sticker for almost any theme or vacation. Good luck and have fun with it. It will make it more fun to look back at an album than go through pictures in a box. As your kids get older they can help arrange the pictures in the book. Also, once you are caught up it will be easier to add the pictures to the book as you print them. I also keep a digital copy of the pictures on the computer and there is some good software out there now for making digital photo albums on the computer.

I too upload all of my photos to Shutterfly.com. I make a point of ordering hard copies each season and I order a couple of my favorite pictures from each month. I try to throw those into a real photo album as soon as they come in the mail. This way it doesn't get overwhelming and I don't care if they are in perfect order because at least it gets done and they will be in some type of order rather than all over the place.

I watch for specials from shutterfly and occasionally order a photo book from their website. It's a photo album you create on their website and the pictures are printed onto pages in a book. I do this for family vacations to keep all the photos from one time together. You can spend a lot of time making the book just right or can choose to have shutterfly randomly place the selected photos into the book to save a lot of time.

So I don't know anything about Shutterfly. Before we switched over to digital photography, I organized several years of photos that were just in shoeboxes. The way it worked is -
1. I did not try to organize chronologically - too many pics! too overwhelming
2. I found some photo albums I really liked at Target and divided them up by subject matter. Albums for travels arranged roughly chronologically. Birthday album that just showed birthdays (that's a fun one to look at now). Album for all our neighorhood events (we have a lot) that I can share with my neighbor friends. Each kid has a school album (some of these are small). I had a special fancy album for my absolute favorite pictures of the kids and dad. Everything else I just tried to arrange in albums chronoloically.
3. You MUST THROW AWAY PHOTOS that are blurry or stupid or just duplicates.
Now we have a mac and I use iphoto for everything - that is absolutely great b/c you just download those photos and you can arrange them into slideshows add music and make dvds from them. Last year when my daughter graduated 5th grade I gathered all the digital pics I could from myself and other parents and made a slideshow of the kids K - 5, set to music. Then each kid got a copy of the dvd at the grad. party.

Good luck!!

Hi C.~
I am in the same boat-boxes and boxes of pictures, so I don't have any organizing tips. However, my grandmother decided a few years back to give alot of pictures to her family, so they wouldn't get mixed up when she died, and she made each grandkid an album from birth through the years of ourselves. We all really enjoyed and have been able to easily add to them since. Good Luck!

I have a little album for each of my kids....pictures that weren't so good, pictures they took, or pictures that really feature them go in their albums.

THen I have a family album each year that I put us in...pictures of our activities and most just us.

then I have an album for my husband's side....pictures given to of us of kids and christmas cards and so forth go in there. And I also have one for my side....my childhood friends and so forth go in there.

I typically get the albums that have the area to write in. And I get a new one each year.

I try to write on the back of pictures and then divide them up between the albums as soon as I get them developed to keep the pile down to a minimum.

I have used MyPublisher.com to make memory books for my kids. It worked really well for me because 90% of my photos are digital.<p>

I also ran across this interesting photo organizing box made by KangaRoom: http://www.kangaroomstorage.com/product/living-room/13/ka... My only concern is that they don't talk about the archival quality of the box.

About 8 years ago I had 15 years worth of family (3 kids) photos mostly in boxes. I had some photos in magnetic albums which I found out deteriorate them.
A good friend had encouraged me for years to take up scrapbooking but I thought I didnt have the time & wasnt creative enough.
At a scrapbooking event in her home I found it was enjoyable to organize my photos in albums & they could be as simple or as detailed as I cared to make them. That summer my kids, my MIL & I took a couple days to separate my photos into 6 containers: heirloom, vacations, Christmas, & one for each kid. My first album was of a recent vacation & it was like reliving those wonderful memories.
As each child has graduated high school I have completed an album for them from birth through graduation. They loved them! They have been the highlight at each of their graduation parties!
I have to tell you that the album making process is an opportunity to relive the moments with your children that fly by so quickly. And you could even choose to make it simpler by creating albums online.
A few years ago I happened to hear a psychologist mention that when children see their own development by looking through photos of themselves it increases their esteem.
Let me know if you want any other tips about getting started.

Hi C., I used to be very good about putting photos in albums, and then I was missing some from Christmas, and instead of skipping a couple pages and moving on, I stopped. It was my daughter's second Christmas. She just turned 28. Her brothers are 29 and 30.
I got 3 big binders, sheet protectors, roll on glue dots and card stock. I am making albums for each of the kids. Unless a photo is amazing of one, then only the one gets it. If there are pictures of grandparents that have passed on or cousins or something, I am copying them on the printer for all three.
I started with 1984, and am up to 1992.
To start, I sorted the photos into 3 piles, for the 3 houses we lived in. Then I went through and sorted by ages (I made a cheat sheet for age and grade per year) and put them in file folders. I also have an "OPK" folder (other people's kids). If there was nobody in the photo, it got tossed. Then I went through each folder and tried to sort them chronologically. My biggest hint, other than birthday candles was the length of my daughter's hair!
As the years progress, the pictures are fewer, thank goodness. It is a daunting task. But hopefully the kids will enjoy them as much as I have revisiting them!
Good luck.
I

C.,

First, start small.. make sure you have all of your photos together so you don't find stray's later on. If that is done you are doing good. Second grab another empty box and index cards of just paper and write decades on them ( 1980, 1990, 2000...etc.) Sort your pics accordingly, I started with the oldest and just work chronologically until all were sorted. Now that you have them into decades you can sort them within the decade. After that is complete you are ready to break your pics down into albums. Make sure you buy the albums that will hold enough pics for the section that you have sorted. Also, don't forget to keep this project put up so the kids don't get them. My girls love to look at our family photos but they are not gentle yet. Since I do have two girls I have wondered how to do the photos now, but I have decided to continue to use my chronological method, and make each of them seperate baby albums, using duplicates from my albums so I will always have a copy.

Lastly, you don't have to make a scrapbook fancy, all you need is your memories and some paper and glue.

Good luck to you on your exciting journey.

A.

I think having an album for each kid is a great idea! My grandma did that for my mom and she treasures it to this day.

The thing about scrapbooking is it isn't just making a fancy page...you don't have to do that! It's the journaling that's important. When you kids look back they'll want to know about each picture. That's what scrapbooking is...writing about each picture or sets of pictures so you have a story that goes along with the photo.

My photo albums from my grandma are full of pictures of people we don't know, and doing things we don't understand. My grandma is gone, so we'll never know!

You can get very inexpensive, easy-to-use albums. You just slide the photo in and then you can add a little something about each picture or sets of pictures on an index card. Nothing fancy! But so worth it!

It is a very daunting task!!! What I do is I have several albums going. I have a family album which I use for family events Easter pictures, vacation pictures, etc. Then I have a Christmas album which is the only one I can ever seem to keep current. I just do all the Christmas's in that album. I also have an album for my daughter that I put all the millions of pictures I take of her in. And that will be her album to take when she gets older. I also use it like a baby book I write my memories of each stage and special things that happened. Then I use online photo books for events that have a ton of pictures. For example my daughters birth, all the pictures we took at the hospital are in a book. Her baptism has it's own book since there were so many pictures of that one event. So I do a little bit of everything to keep up to date.

I used to have all my photos in albums, but they began taking up too much space on the bookshelves so I started using photo boxes. (I take A LOT of photos). So, I have a photo box for my son, another for my daughter and one for family. I store the photos in date order in the boxes so when the kids are older they each will get their boxes of photos from their childhood. I also use shutterfly.com to create photo books for each child for each year. (kodakgallery.com has these books as well.) It's basically the best photos from that year all compiled in one nice bound book. These photo books are beautiful. And, they don't take up a lot of space. When the kids are older I will also give them these books with their photo boxes so they will have a copy of every photo I have of them growing up..

I love taking photos, but I know that it's hard to keep up with organizing them all. I used to scrapbook everything, but now I don;t have time for that! This is what I do:

I put all of my photos on Shutterfly, and have them organized by "albums", which are each a different event (ie, Easter 2009). From there, I created a share site, where I can post my photos for friends and relatives to see. That part was very easy, and I even earned free prints when I set it up. I also buy their print plans, such as 200 prints for $20. You can use the prints over a 2 year time span. I wait until I have just under 100 pictures I want to order to save on shipping. Then I choose just my favorite photos to order from each album (on Easter I took about 60 photos, but ordered only about 20 of them). Finally, when my pictures arrive, I organize them by date and slide them into regular photo albums that have "sleeves" and a little space to write a caption.

As far as individual albums for the kids to keep later, this year I'm making my preschooler a book about her first year in school. I just bought an inexpensive scrapbook because I wanted to save some of her projects and stuff from school, and I stick in a few pictures along the way. So for example I ordered 2 prints of her first day of school picture- one for my family album and one for her book. It's not too overwhelming if I just do one picture here and there for her scrapbook. My girls love looking at the albums! Sorry so long... hope this helps you!

I personally think that each child would like a book just about them. Throw a few pictures in as well of the siblings. Grab some craft letters from a dollar store and glue their names on the front. Inside of the front cover, write a not to them about your thoughts while putting the book together. This is what my mother did 29 years ago for me and 35 years ago for my brother and we both still have them all. I also started to do the same thing for my son. It is inexpensive because all you buy are the photo albums and the letters, but the book will mean soo much in years to come. Good Luck!

Creative memories has these square plastic boxes with dividers. I've tried to find something cheaper, but nothing is as good as those for organizing.

Creative Memories also has nice leather books you can use for albums. It gives you the opportunity to journal your memories about the photos, but no creativity is required.

Also, if you have digital, those online photo books are nice too.

Having lived through cassettes, records, albums, little disks for the computer--remember those--well you can't read the media on them now unless you keep special players. So I keep hard copies of the photos too. I also upload my photos on Shutterfly or Walgreens--they're safe in case something happens to my computer or albums.

Hi C.,
Shutterfly is a great site to upload to, but Walgreens does the same thing! If you can scan and upload those photos to Walgreens, you can have them make a scrapbook for you! I am a scrapbooker, so that is what I do with mine. I only have one child but, I have scrapbooking friends that have more than one child and they make 1 album for each child. As they get older though, it will turn into 1 or 2 pages in the family album! Right now I am working on my son's first year (he will be 2 April 21st!)! Organization is the key, and you really need to set aside some time for yourself to organize first!
Have you ever tried a scrapbooking class? I thought I wasn't creative enough either but, you never know where your hidden talents are! Try a class or host a Creative Memories Scrapbooing party. You will learn more about scrapbooking and possibly enjoy it. Step out of your confort zone and try a scrapbooking class!
Hope it all works out for you!
K. L

I didn't have a chance to read the posts, so I'm sorry if I am being redundant.
When each of my 2 boys graduated 8th grade (last year and 3 years ago) I put together a simple scrapbook with pictures and memorabilia from K-8th grade. They turned out great. However, I also realized that it would be nice to have pictures for them to browse through as well, so I got some photo boxes from JoAnn Fabrics, had reprints made of special events, vacations, and at home over the years, dated them (specific dates are not real impt, but make sure you put an approximate date or age on each one) and threw them all in the photo boxes. It makes for a great keepsake.
Also, you may want to have some separate folders/boxes/ containers to put your separated pictures in as a holding spot until you work on them. You can sort as you go to make the project easier.