Scrapbooking: So Many Pictures!

Do you ever have a period of time when you want to be productive but your brain power is completely spent? That was me last night. I was ready for a mindless task! So I pulled out some boxes of potentially unscrapbooked photos and thought I'd at least remove the duplicates so I'd have a better idea of how many photos need to be added to my 3-ring binder scrapbooks.

If you recall (and I know this is riveting!!!), I spent last week mired in 2001. Last night I worked ahead on two boxes of photos from 2002. This task turned out to take a little more brain power than I anticipated, but I have to say I'm super-motivated to continue after the progress I made!

I spread out on the couch with two boxes of photos and the lone scrapbook (plus a vacation album) from 2002. There would normally be at least two scrapbooks completed for a given year, so I suspected that there were LOTS of events in those photo boxes which haven't been scrapbooked yet. That turned out to be true. For some unknown reason, I really jumped around in 2002 with my scrapbooking, leaving LOTS of events undone.

My photos are organized in small boxes with monthly tabs which made it easy to go month by month, removing one month at a time. My goals were simple:

1) If the photo is in the scrapbook, the duplicate in the box gets recycled.

2) If the event has not yet been scrapbooked, then I'll keep only one set of photos and recycle the duplicates.

By doing these two things, I hoped to get a better handle on exactly HOW MUCH needs to be scrapbooked for those years. I'll use pocket pages to quickly add those photos to the scrapbook.

 GUYS: Here's how exciting this is! I started with TWO boxes of photos for 2002, and by the time I was done, I was left with HALF of one box! This means that while I still have lots of photos to add to the albums, I have FAR FEWER than one would think given the two very full boxes I had at the start.

Look at this box of duplicate photos. It weighs even more than Lily! :) This represents duplicates from only 2001 and 2002 -- only two years! SERIOUSLY, those photos were taking up a lot of space...and they were sucking the motivation right out of me!

Before I do any more sorting like this, I'm going stop and put my 2001 and 2002 photos into pocket pages and get them into the albums, along with the memorabilia I've kept for those years. Then I'll proceed to the next year in the same fashion. 

What would it feel like to have this photo mess under control? It's going to be great! It may be premature to say this, but I feel like I might be on the tiniest little bit of a roll!

jp