Friday, February 25, 2011

the purge.



I have been slowly working on a house-wide purge over the past few months.  Room by room, I am getting rid of so much stuff!  Lately I've been feeling so overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that can accumulate now that our family has grown.  There are piles and piles that are going to goodwill, and the garbage bags and recycling are piling up.  I love it!

One of the things I am getting anxiety over throughout this purge is photos and the storage of them.  For the amount of pictures we take in this house, we need to come up with a better system.  I am the worst at updating pics in frames or printing pics to put in albums.  I have come across so many shoeboxes stuffed with pics (both old pics, new family pics and lots of polaroids).  I have quite a few scrapbooks that I never found the time to finish.  And then there are all of the pics just sitting on our computer that have never been printed.  See, I'm getting all anxious just thinking about them all!

After much contemplation, I have finally come up with a plan.  Here it is:

First, I have started flying through iphoto and sending piles of pics off to snapfish to be printed.  Those will go straight into simple albums.  No captions, nothing fancy, just pics in chronological order.  That in itself gives me such a huge sense of relief.  Even though we do back-up our computer (both to an online storage and an external hard drive), most of my anxiety was over the fact that if something ever happened to our computer, we could possibly lose our pics and I just hated not having any of them printed.  I just finished our first album and I love having it available to flip through.  And once I am caught up with the backlog of the last 5+ years, I will continue to print pics every few months and just put them in an album.

Next up will be finishing the scrapbooks.  This will take time and I plan on working on them while the babies are napping.  Once all of the scrapbooks are done, I am retiring my scrapbooking stuff.  It was fun while it lasted, but who has time for scrapbooking anymore?!

I am also planning on sorting through all of the pics we have stuffed in shoeboxes and putting some in albums and chucking the rest.  And then finally, I am going to work on updating the pics I have in frames throughout the house and I am also planning a "framed gallery wall" that will go all along the wall in our staircase.  That will be a work in progress and I plan on posting more details about it soon.

Phew!  My plan was a little longer than I expected, but that is what happens when you do absolutely nothing with the thousands of pictures you take!!!

So here is my question for you - What do you do with your pics?  Are you good about printing and organizing them?  Or are you ok with just having them stored on your computer?  Do you have a photo organizing "system"?  Any scrapbookers still left out there?  Do tell.

6 comments:

Elizabeth Frick said...

I LOOOOOVE purging stuff!!!
And man, you have got quite the plan! I'm jealous.
AFA my own photo storage, I'm kinda counting on you to come over after you're done at your house and whip our collection into shape. :)

Sarah said...

Every month I upload my favorite pics to snapfish in an album labeled with the month and the year. At the end of each year, I go through each month, and make a scrapbook online in chronological order with little captions. That way I have each year of our family's life in a simple thin book that I can stack on a shelf. It doesn't take much time and I am diligent in organizing the pics as I take them. I also scrapbook the first year of life in a real scrapbook. This is one area of my life I am organized in, can't say much for all the other areas!!!

Michelle said...

Purge away! We tend to never print pics unless for family, which I usually send via Target so they can pick up the photos themselves. Most of our photos are on my pc and then backup nightly to a another pc, which backs up to some place in TX. I just hate all the clutter of printed photos honestly. I have old photos in a big fat box in the basement and never touch them.

Christine @ 12,450miles said...

I've been saving this post until I had some time to sit down and properly comment. So, watch out!

First, YAY for purging!!! Ever since we listed the house last summer, we've been purging. It started with jam-packing a *box* truck from the salvation army. I kid you not. I was literally disgusted with us. So I now make it a priority to go through one room a month and confirm that everything has a purpose. It's such a great feeling!

Like Michelle, I'm not a big printed photo person. I do plan to make a blurb book one day though. We have a digital photo frame that we update as well as the screen savers on the computers, and the TV, that rotate through our photos. As for backup, we have a backup run every night that uploads everything to "the cloud." That said, I need to start purging my photos since I just filled my second 500GB hard drive. Oops.

kristin said...

we use apeture to organize our photos on our computer and then we back them up to another hard drive... i'm also hoping to get a third hard drive to store off-site soon... i'm so afraid to lose our digital copies! i would love more printed photos out, but i don't want the clutter and i always forget to update the wall photos... a photo wall totally helps with that though. :)

i also loved this idea:
http://ashleyannphotography.com/blog/2011/02/10/happiness-has-arrived-my-publisher/comment-page-2/#comment-50034

:)

jen said...

Throwing things away makes me giddy :) Love the idea for the photos--we don't print anything. Guess it's time!

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