Organizing photos
I love taking photos and with that comes the question what to do with them all.
I've always enjoyed organizing my best ones in traditional photo albums with photo corners. I've done that for many years. The albums and the rest of my photo paraphenalia is stored in two small cabinets in the dining area.
Photos of Wille are now in eight albums and there are also some albums from trips and travels and micellaneous photos from before Wille was born.
The pre digital leftovers that didn't make it into the albums but are still good shots worth hanging on to are stored in these two vintage card boxes my parents once used for their business cards in the 70's. The old frames were broken so I switched them to new leftover ones from some IKEA boxes instead.
The one marked "Wille" is divided by age. The other micellaneous one is divided by year.
Some photos are more difficult to sort. At least I think so. They are the ones that are so random so they don't fit in everywhere elso. I keep two boxes, one for Martin's random photos and one for mine. The boxes contain vintage snapshots and portraits which for some reason didn't make it in to albums of that time, random photos received from friends and relatives and sizes that don't fit into my blue boxes above. It's kind of fun to flick through them once in a while and I don't really mind that they are all mixed up. I guess the key is not to fill the boxes with the photos that can go in the more organized spots so these won't fill up completely.
About a year ago I decided I needed to sort the digital photos too instead of just leaving them on the computer. Both because I was afraid I'd loose them if my computer would crash (which it did six months later!) but also because I wanted to keep them together with the albums where I could touch them. Sound weird? I'm the same with magazines. I prefer the printed version the the web one because I can hold it and look at it. It somehow feels more substantial.
I do print quite a few of the digitally shot ones and put them in the albums but with digital photography one tends to shoot more frames, at least I do. So before I decided how to save my digitals I ruthlessly deleted about 80% of all the shots. There is simply no point in having seven very similar ones, I kept the best one or a couple of the best ones and deleted the rest. This left me with a managable quantity to burn to DVD discs.
I decided to have one disc per year and for some occasions separate ones. Martin's sailing photos are on separate discs and so are some of the ones with photos of Wille too.
You can get discs which are printable directly on to a white surface but I opted for printable stickers simply because it's easier to reprint a sticker than the whole disc if there's a mistake. I made a template with a software I normally use but with most CD/DVD stickers the software is included or the template can be downloaded.
For the year discs I just chose a font I like and wrote the year and what is included on the disc. For the other discs I chose one of the photos from the disc and used that as the background for writing the contents. I love how they turned out in their plastic holders.
I've since heard that the disc format may become obsolete in the not so far away future so now I'm tryng to think of other ways to store the photos too. I think I will probably print more to put into the albums and maybe also have some of those Blurb photobooks printed. Have you had any photobooks printed by them? Were you pleased with the results?














