Photo Organization Project: Part 4

Do you ever start a project with the very best of intentions but find that you have to set it aside for awhile? Or a very long while?

That's what happened with the massive photo organization project I started last fall after my estate sale. In a nutshell, I brought home a ton of completely unorganized photos and slides from my parents' house. I needed to integrate them into my photo boxes so I could begin to determine which ones I might like to scrapbook someday.You can see how this project started HERE.

Shortly after I started this project, my 102-year old grandma (my dad's mom) started having a variety of issues and it fell to my cousins and me to get her moved to a nursing home. That happened in February, after which I was responsible for clearing out her household items and selling her home. Grandma passed away last month, having lived a full and long life. I feel very fortunate to have spent a lot of quality time with her and hope to write more about this later.

Long story short: My life has been essentially on hold again since January of this year, so my photo organization project fell off of my radar screen for awhile. Finally a few weeks ago I was able to get back to where I left off last November. It was a good feeling!

First, I finished my very "rough sort" of photos by decade and then by year. I still have many older photos I can't specifically date, but hopefully I'll be able to get close by looking more closely at furniture, clothing, cars, and other clues in the pictures themselves. I filed undated photos separately.

As I sorted photos, I actually tossed quite a few. (Shocking, I know!) Many of the photos I brought home were from vacations my parents took in later years. I kept photos they were in but tossed all but a few scenery pictures from each trip, keeping enough to provide context. Of course, I kept all the photos of trips I took with them because I have memories of many of those experiences and may scrapbook them some day. (MAY is the operative word here!)

Next I brought out my own photo boxes which are indexed by year and month. I took a year's worth of photos from my parents' house and began to sort them by month, dropping them into my box. Again, there were some photos which I could not specifically date, so I filed them separately. Once I'm done with this part of the process, I will go back through each box and toss duplicate photos. My mom and I usually had two sets of photos printed and then exchanged them, so there are plenty of duplicates in these boxes.

I'm also in the process of sorting through our old slides and having some professionally digitized, so I'll eventually print the most important ones and add to these photo boxes.

It's a big project, but I'm hoping now that things have settled down a little bit for me, I can finally finish it. It will be a great feeling to have all of the printed photos in order so I can decide what to do with them.

Then maybe -- just maybe -- I'll be able to get back on track with my scrapbooking! :)

jp