Organizing Photos for Keeps

I've posted about Project Life before, but I wanted to write about it again, to help ensure that your children don't end up with what I have in my garage...a large pile of pictures without context or thought.

Yup- those are adorable pictures of me as a youngin... Unfortunately, they have no rhyme or reason to them.  Collected for years in one drawer, or box- one place or another.

Do you have to use Project Life to display or organize your photos...no, but I do think it's easy and totally worth it.  But lets take a step back.  Let's look at how you get those photos off of your phones, off of your computers and make them accessible to anyone.

The first step to printing and organizing photos- to having your children's life made accessible to them and others is to download monthly and organize digitally.  My recommendation is to start here.

Step 1: Make a folder on your computer- label it this year 2015

Step 2: Inside that folder make a 01-2015 folder.

Step 3: Download all the photos into that folder the first week of February.

Step 4: Repeat steps 2-3 on March 1st, and do on through the year.

It's that simple.  Knowing when a photo was taken will dramatically improve your ability to know what was going on, and to have recall about the event.  I know it seems strange, but this is especially true about those little moments.  When did the baby first sit-up?  Crawl?  Walk?  Knowing what month these events happened in can really make the difference between being able to write about your child or not.

Want to take it a step farther?  Inside of the monthly folders include additional folders with the events labeled.  Like "Family Picnic to Alondra Park- Date" or "Wedding of Greg and Rachel- May 4th".  That way you have the basics, and the photos can provide the details.

What we do in our family is put all our photos onto an external hard drive.  This makes it easy to take with us to friends or family- to give them their photos, as well as to grab in case of a fire. As much as I love my Project Life albums (and I do!) they are a bit heavy.  By grabbing the hard drive I ensure that we get all the photos and everything out of the house.

Still think its too much? 

I think one of the best things we can give to our children is their own memories.  My sister's memories are strong, but mine are not.  This way I can help make sure that both EG and Ocho have not only their memories, but the images that go along with them.  That they can look through them and see the people we've lost, and remember.