Thursday, September 29, 2011

Getting It Together: Organizing Photos

When my mother passed away in May, we needed to put together some memory boards for her calling hours and funeral. We took it a step further and made media presentations to go along with the memory boards. It turned out so nice, and we were so happy to honor my mother in a manner that she herself would have enjoyed.
But when we took the photos out of the aged albums we ran into some problems…We won’t be able to put them back in the albums because they have deteriorated, so a different solution has become necessary.
We have pictures in 3 formats…
  1. Photographs
  2. CD’s
  3. jpegs from a camera.
Photographs:
I want to eventually make these into a digital format for ease of use in the future. The overwhelming amount of photos really needs containment in an organized manner first. I found a great website online to help us with a solution (pfile).
I have chosen photo boxes to hold the photos, because it will simplify my sorting process. The boxes hold over 1,000 photos each and come with dividers for easy filing.
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These boxes will make the pictures easier to find and this option takes up less space than than the albums that had taken up an entire shelf. I have thousands of pictures to reorganize and I don’t want it to take me a lifetime…
Once they are organized I can go through the CD’s and make sure I don’t already have the photos that match them. Then I will scan in the best of the best photos after that. This will eliminate the need to scan in thousands of pictures.
I sorted enough to fill in one box to show you my system.

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In a future posts I can show you how I organized the CD’s, and the digital files. I will also show you how to create a basic presentation.
Photos are a wonderful way to share the memories of our past. My mother took great strides in always taking pictures to hold onto all of those times. I am grateful to her that she did so, and that I can honor her memory now by making use of these photos in a way that can bless my family and my mothers friends.

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