How To Organize Your Boxes Of Photos

Day Trip to SF This Past Week

Land's End

How many of us have boxes and boxes of photos that we plan to organize "someday"?  This morning I ran across an article on the FS blog  that has some great ideas.  It was written by a Guest Blogger.  Here is a small section of the article in the link below.

"Photo organizers use a simple acronym called the “ABCS” to help clients sort their printed photos. Use this acronym for yourself (see step four), and you will make quick progress! Here are the ABCS:

• “A” photos are the most important photos and should be digitized and placed in an album.
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• “B” photos are the photos that support family stories but don’t necessarily belong in the “A” pile. These are photos you can’t bring yourself to toss out, and they stay in the box.
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• “C” stands for “Yes, you CAN throw out your photos.” Toss out the doubles, blurry photos, and excessive landscape photos. How many sunset photos do you really need? Make sure you have large garbage bags for all the “C” photos you are discarding.
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• Last, but most important of all, is “S.” Does the photo tell a story? Sometimes a poorly composed photo of your grandmother with a silly smile is an “A” photo because you know it represents her unique personality."
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http://tinyurl.com/h9b2s4s

I found "C" very liberating.  It's like when I was studying design and came across articles on decorating bookcases and we were encouraged to discard the dust jackets of all of our books.  You only need a dust jacket if you want to sell a collector's version of a book to the highest bidder.  I went home and removed every dust jacket from all of our entire library.  It looked so much nicer and felt so much better.  I envision the same experience ridding our collection of photos of the unessential pictures.

Just think how much easier it will be to scan once you have done this organizing process.  Let's face it, the generations below us will never deal with a boatload of snapshots in boxes.  Which bring up a topic for another time.  How do we organize our electronic photos?

Stern Grove~SF

Last Friday