Looking for that one picture....

Several weeks ago my daughter put in a request on behalf of the middle school for her Kindergarten photo and I've kept moving the task down the to do list because I knew it wasn't just going to be a two-second job. It would snowball into something. She's in 8th Grade and it's for the yearbook. I can't imagine being the individual responsible for acquiring these for every student AND putting the target deadline for Winter  Christmas Break. I'd love to see her inbox...

To put this in perspective, Kindergarten for us was 2006, right there between film cameras being stuffed in the back of the drawer and the complete acceptance of digital photography. Social media sharing also exploded around this time. Through this, the annual fall school picture day has still yielded an envelope of pictures that family loves to receive and display in their homes for years to come. Despite carefully posed selfies with clever filters that adorn Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and (insert 500 photo sharing sites here), the school picture is the annual avatar on the timeline of our kids' maturation.

I've never been the milk and cookies after school, June Cleaver type mom and I don't do a lot of the mom stuff in the traditional way, but I have done a pretty decent job at keeping pictures organized throughout my adult life.

I've shared my photo organization method with people over the years and it seems like a good thing to share here. While the above picture seems like chaos, it really wasn't. It was just one final organization step I had not completed yet in the overall system I use to keep pictures organized. It took me about half an hour to actually locate the photo I needed, and another hour or two to finish organizing this part of our photo archive.

The tips below are for the everyday folks trying to manage the day to day pictures. I'm not a professional....I'm sure they've all got a better system. One big suggestion as you embark on this process... when you are reminded of the story of the photos you see, jot it down on a piece of paper. Even if you aren't a scrapbooker, others seeing the photos later will enjoy the story if it's filed along with the photos. For digital photos, most photo management software allows for captions or notes or something.

Digital photography:
I'm a scrapbooker and the first thing I learned years ago was start with today and stay current going forward, then catch up the past when you have time. Get your workflow down that works for you. Then apply it going backward, most recent first.

Start the new year off right and set up a folder in your picture section on your computer or the cloud of your choice for 2015, make folders for each month. That's where you will start January 1, 2015 regularly transferring pictures from your phone, camera, etc. I do this on average, once a week from my phone.

I use Dropbox as the in between, then transfer to iPhoto after scrapbooking, editing, deleting the duds, etc for permanent backup. My DSLR has a wifi feature and they get automatically dumped into my computer when I'm home, but the same process applies if you transfer off your camera via USB.  Dates are embedded in the meta data (right click, properties) so there's no need to make weekly folders or daily etc...unless you are highly OCD, which I am, and I do, but it's more for my scrapbook workflow than overall preservation. By year, by month. Simple. Some photo organization programs use tags and facial recognition...if this helps you, go for it. I don't take more time to do that, plus I only have one child so it just became an unnecessary step for me.

This is the system I have used for digital pictures since digital started. The same structure is on my computer, my onsite backup drive, and the backup drive that I recently sent with my parents to put in their fireproof safe. If you don't have your digital pictures on a backup drive, please please do this. Been there, done that with a crashed hard drive and days of waiting to see if that last picture of me with my grandpa can be recovered. It sucks. I think this event was when I got as serious about digital photo organization as I had been my film photos.

The blessing of this effort: If I want to see my daughter's 6th birthday cake...I can find it in about 5 minutes. You'll thank yourself for this effort when it comes time to get that high school graduation slide show ready. Your descendants will thank you as well.

If you have a 10+ year mess of digital pictures on your computer (or phone, multiple cameras, multiple SD cards, CDs, etc) this is going to take some time so break it down into workable parts. Set up the years and months folders. Start dragging pictures and folders into them here and there. Then dig in year by year, month by month while you're sitting there watching TV, bored at the next family gathering, having coffee or a glass of wine while waiting for the kids at practice, etc. Don't forget to back up.

Pre Digital:
I developed the computer system I use from how I organized all my film camera pictures prior to digital after my daughter was born. Everything is sorted by year, then month and/or major event. If you can't break old pictures down by month, then do the best you can to get them by year or event, or decade if you have to.  It isn't always easy to remember. My sister and I started this process with my mom several years ago and it was challenging so use other people to help if you can. It's really quite fun! We need to finish the job with her sometime and I'd venture a guess that the same thing needs to happen on my husband's side of the family.
Gather film photos in a central location over the next few months. Feel free to throw out duplicates, dud pictures that are especially common with film photography. It's ok. Really. You don't need 25 blurry pictures of Aunt Ethel...one or two are fine.
Get some photo boxes. Michaels, Walmart, Target, etc have them. The beauty of digital photography....I only have 4 big photo storage boxes on the basement shelf for my entire life...up to the mid 2000s.
Get index card dividers that you can label or just cut paper, card stock, or use envelopes to label with the years, months.
Dig in, make piles, write on the back of pictures, sort sort sort. Then file.

Professional family pictures, school pictures of your kids, your other kids in the family, etc:
The size and number of these made it inconvenient to store in the photo boxes, which is why I had the huge piles yesterday that were only partially organized. I use envelopes divided by year, child, grade.
My nieces and nephews school pictures go in envelopes...one envelope for my side, one envelope for my husband's side. It's their parents' job to organize those! haha!
When I started doing an annual album in the Project Life method these pictures became part of the album and are put in either digitally or placed in the large envelope stored in the album where I put greeting cards, etc.
Our cousins and their kids pictures are similarly divided...they all go in one envelope by family.

What about all that artwork the kids brought home through early elementary school?
Save a few favorites, take digital photos of the rest, and toss it. Then make a photo book on any number of photo sites out there or make it part of your annual album. I know when we moved this last time I got rid of so much of the artwork, but I photographed it for this purpose. Somewhere in the 2011 photo files are the pictures because that's the winter after we moved and when I did the big purge of all that stuff that was hiding in our closets for 8 years.

The job may seem overwhelming so take your time. Set a goal of a year or so to get it under control, while keeping the current year organized. It really is worth it to have this part of your life somewhat organized. Hope these tips have given some direction to the job. You don't have to scrapbook anything, just keep it organized. Post any questions in the comments.

Falling back, looking forward

Staircase: Handley Regional Library, Winchester VA

    Falling back...the time change.

     This early Fall event signals the start of our family's dread of dwindling daylight and all the mood and motivation that dwindles with the sunlight. We live near the eastern edge of the Eastern Time Zone so as I started this post at 430pm telling the dog 'it's not time to eat yet', it IS looking a lot like the dinner hour instead of afternoon...and it will only get worse the closer we get to the Winter Solstice.
     At any rate the flipping of the calendar to November always triggers in me a sort of reflection upon the year and thinking forward to the new year.
     In past years, around this time I usually get caught up on the annual scrapbook, start thinking about what goals I set at the beginning of the year, what I still have to accomplish or table for the next year, and begin really thinking about holiday plans.
     Let's take a little inventory of where I stand on some of those things and where I want to go....because some of these things will come up in my posts in the coming year as the goal of this site is a forum for creativity through writing, photographs, and artsy crafty productions.

• Annual scrapbook: Yes, I'm one of 'those' people. I try not to let my pictures reside in the deep recesses of a hard drive for infinity. That being said, I take a very low stress approach to it. I use it as more of a storytelling and writing avenue and a reason to get all those pictures off digital media rather than a terribly creative one. Plus I suffer from CRS (Can't Remember, uhhh, Squat) and memory keeping and writing helps me preserve the thoughts in my head that leave as quickly as they arrive. (Thank you Day One App for iEverything) As much as I love paint, canvas, paper, stamps, ink and glitter for the purpose of cards or cutesy fun things, I actually hate scrapbooking in the traditional sense. I could never understand why people used all that stuff for one tiny picture on a huge 12x12 page. I tried it, and I was pretty decent at it, but I always knew it just wasn't me. 

     After being 'caught up' for all but two years in the mid 2000s, this year I bagged the family scrapbook way back in Week 2. I decided it just wasn't in the cards this year despite the easy to manage method I use (Becky Higgins Project Life with lots of inspiration from Cathy Zielske) I did, however make sure to keep my proven photo organization intact on the computer. If you want to see a photo from June 2014, I can get you one in about 10 seconds.
     My personal opinion on the scrapbooking thing is that it is very valuable in telling the stories of your life, especially the day to day things that at the time may seem mundane but when you go back later on are the most treasured bits and pieces. Plus, nowadays we all seem to have a camera in our hands. The stories behind them need preserved for the future. I have released the idea of our 2014 book being in the shelf. In future years its absence will be a void, but that tells a story as well. The 2015 book's opening pages will likely explain why to the future reader. My focus needed to be elsewhere this year.

• Resolutions Goals for the year. I stopped making resolutions several years ago. Who keeps them? Really? Several years ago I was going through a refocusing of my life and ran across a blog post on Ali Edwards  website, who I follow still. She selected a word of the year, and called it One Little Word. I was inspired at the approach because she really has a way of embracing a word each year and making it hers, then seeing how that word shapes her year.      So in late 2008 going into 2009, I decided this was how I was going to set goals and approach things going into the new year. I chose the following that year and in subsequent years: Simplify, Focus, Discover, Leap, Build, and this year Trust. You can check out last year's One Little Word post to get the idea. It really is kind of fun. 

      The single best thing about choosing a word these last few years, for me, has been each word becomes a mantra for the year at the beginning, then toward the end it is a pretty accurate reflection on the year. Even though I didn't scrapbook my year I do recall times when the word (as well as previous years' words) found me in my every day life this past year. I often bring the word to mind when trying to make a decision or deal with a situation. Trust this year has meant trust the processes in my life, trust the people in my life, trust myself, trust God's plan for me, among other things.
      This is the time of year where I start looking for next year's word to find me, and it always does. I'm sure this will be the subject of a later blog post.

• Holiday projects There's something about this time of year where even the least crafty of us tend to get a little creative. I've always thought it's a lack of outdoor activity thing bringing us indoors after active summers and a perhaps a throwback to our childhoods of making things in school to give as gifts to our families. Who doesn't love a paper chain hanging on the tree? 

     This fall I'm taking part in the 'thankful' movement and doing Cathy Zielske's 30 Days of Thankful project. It is a pretty simple documentation with photo(s) project of what many people post on social media throughout November. I may share a few things from the album here in more detail in coming weeks, but lots of what I photograph and journal is private family stuff, and the internet is a pretty public thing, so I'm guarded that way. (I'm trying here Dad, to do what you told me, and not waste my love of the written word, we'll see how it evolves. ;-)
     I may do December Daily along with Ali Edwards, but I've yet to determine a format that isn't too overwhelming and I want to focus on some hands on paper crafting with cards and things this year so we'll see what happens. These mini digital projects help me with my ongoing goal of learning more about Photoshop and doing most of my scrapbooking with digital templates, then either printing the final product in a book or printing the pages and dropping them in an album. I also want to get my habit back around to regular life documentation because I WILL be doing an annual album again in 2015. Just like anything else, if you have a routine and a habit, you'll be more likely to stick with it.
     I'm doing the Project Life  method again as the backbone of the album because it just works for me. If you are curious about scrapbooking but just don't know how to get going, check it out. I do digital pages, then keep the little pieces of life's ephemera and put it all in one album per year. But if all you want to do is print your photos and write a little something about them, it really is just that simple with the products available. Oh yah, and there's an app for that too which is a game changer for lots of people. No computer required. Just your iPhone or iPad, upload to a printing service or photo book, and you're done. (coming soon to droid)
     I spent some time today assembling folders on my computer with digital elements I plan to use, most of them from Cathy Zielske. I took last year's title page, which never got printed, and adapted it for 2015. I taped a few visual representations of the elements I chose to use this year to my computer screen so I can easily decide from week to week what to use in the albums. I have so many more options in my collection, but after the derailing of last year, I realize it's best to just keep it super simple. I realize that my super simple may be more complex than your super simple. I encourage you to find your own 'simple'. lol.
 
     So that's where I have been today, and where I'm heading. Thanks for coming along on the journey. Annnnndddd....is it time for bed yet?
C.