Organizing Your Print Photos: Take The First Step

When it comes to organizing your print photos, like every other organizing project, you have to take the first step. Well, I guess the first step is really to decide if you are ready to tackle the project. Once you have committed to the process, the first step is figuring out what you have and where all those photos are.

Find Your Print Photos

Before you can start finding all the photos of Great Aunt Betty or even tossing the bad, blurry photos from the 80s, the first thing you need to do is figure out what you have in the way of printed photos.  No problem, you say! I know I have tons of photos and albums.  Ok, so it seems easy, but if you are like most people I work with, you have photos scattered all over your house and maybe even at other people’s homes too. This is the time to hunt and gather all those print photos.

Look high and low to find as much as possible before you begin organizing your print photos.  It will be much easier to move everything through your workflow (a fancy word for how you are going to do things and in which order) if you do it consistently.  Adding things later can take away from that consistency. Finding more photos later is not the end of the world, but it’s just easier to do it all at once.

Where Your Photos Might Be Hiding

I’ve done some brainstorming for you and compiled a list of places you can look for your precious family printed photos. Time to put on your detective hat (or maybe your archeologist hat)!

• Photo albums
• Photo boxes
• Framed pictures (even behind other pictures in the frames)
• Scrapbooks
• Relatives’ homes
• Plastic bins
• On the refrigerator
• Drawers – dresser, junk, kitchen, coffee table, china cabinet
• Closets
• Under beds, couches, dressers, and other furniture
• In the nightstand
• Jewelry boxes
• Tucked between pages of books (family Bible, favorite books, cookbooks, family history books)
• Wallet
• File folder
• Memory boxes and hope Chests
• Yearbooks
• Safety deposit box or wall safe
• Undeveloped film
• Unpacked moving boxes
• Attic and basement
• Garage
• Storage unit
• Storage room
• Secret hiding spot – under a floorboard, inside the mattress

You may have other hiding places that I haven’t even thought of. So think outside the (photo) box on this one. Also, be very careful not to start reminiscing too much. There will be lots of time for that later.

9 Reasons You Aren’t Organizing Your Photos And 5 Reasons You Should

Put It All In One Place

Once you’ve exhausted the possibilities of photo hiding spots, it is very helpful to designate a single location in your home to store the pictures. Ideally, it will be a place like the rarely-used dining room table or a guest room where all of the photos can live while you are working on your project. If the room can accommodate a large flat surface, like a table or a desk, that is ideal so you can really spread out while you work. If you can leave the project out and visible while you are organizing, all the better. You are more likely to finish your project if you can see it.

If you don’t have a large space that can be used exclusively for the project for an extended period of time, get a couple of bins or boxes to hold everything as you work through the planning and sorting process.

As you gather your photos, you may want to do a rough sort. By that I mean, collect all the photos that belonged to your maternal grandmother in one pile, while your mother’s albums go in another. If you have tons of loose pictures, grab a bin to corral them all until you can start sorting them. We don’t want an avalanche of pictures happening in your dining room. That’s how you got into this situation in the first place!

Organizing your print photos doesn’t have to be a painful process. Get started by locating all your pictures and getting them to one central location.  Then you can start developing a plan of attack

Grab your own copy of our list of over 50 places your precious family photos may be hiding.

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