Organizing Your Photos

At this time of year, many of us make New Year’s resolutions to get in shape, eat better, or be more organized.  The problem with these resolutions is that they are much too general.  If you  “want to be more organized”, I would ask, “WHAT do you want to organize?”  If you answered: “my photos” I would say, “That’s a great place to start!!” 

This is a project that can be completed relatively quickly, doesn’t require a lot of money and you will see results almost immediately.

I would suggest organizing your photos into themes or years. For example, every year I make a Cottage Book for my husband. I collect our favorite photos from the season and arrange them into a photo book that I give him at Christmas.  It’s a great way to keep the year in one place and so much fun for us to look back on. Some other good themes to start with are: “A Year In Review”, “Child’s First Year” or, more broadly, “Elementary Years”. It’s always good to have a beginning and an end date!

The following steps will help you create a photo book that you will love to look back at.

Collect all the photos for your theme. Check your Facebook account, email, texts, ask your friends and parents, check the box in the basement, the junk drawer, and the front of the fridge

Create a folder with your theme’s name on your computer to store all the digital photos in one location

Scan hard copy photos and upload them to the theme folder

Arrange photos in chronological order, crop, and edit if necessary. (It’s easier to edit photos on your computer before you upload them to a photo book site)

Upload the folder with your photos to the photo book site
(I like Vista Print www.vistaprint.ca which is easy to use or Costco Photo Center www.costcophotocentre.ca ) 

Once photos are uploaded to the external site (Vista Print etc) you will need to choose the size and format of your photo book, page layouts, text sizes, and colours and then name your project
 
Place your order. Remember, you can order multiple copies if you want to.

In just a few days, you will have your photos organized and in one place and you can say!  “I did it!  I organized my photos! I kept my Resolution!”

This blog was brought to you Justine McVeigh at JustDownSize.