So I had a few photos…

Okay, I had a few boxes of photos.

Well, maybe more than a few boxes of photos.

They’d been organized before, by category, but over the years, they had gotten somewhat mixed up. And on top of that I had all the photos from when I dismantled my childhood home after our mom passed away in 2020. She’d had a lot of them in albums, but I had taken them out and put them in boxes, both to save space and to think about later. It was finally time to do something with them.

First, I searched “photo albums vs boxes” and watched the two videos above. The first one tells you how you should organize your photos by decade, and then you can put them in boxes. The second video tells you to take your boxes of photos and randomly put them into albums, not worrying about what order they are in. I decided to do a combination of both. My idea was to organize them by topic, but not necessarily in chronological order.

For example, I organized church activities by category, such as missions conferences, Sunday school, and Easter dramas but not by any particular year. I went ahead and mixed the different years together, partly because I didn’t feel like getting carried away organizing, and also because I didn’t always remember when a lot of them were taken.

But then, after I had finished a “category” and gone on to another, invariably I found more photos that should have gone with them. Since by this time I had two albums, I thought of the great idea to take out some pages from one and insert them where they should have been in the other. Foster thought it sounded good, so I proceeded.

The result was that once I had unscrewed the little posts holding the pages in, I ended up having to remove way more pages than I’d thought in order to get to the spot where I wanted to insert the ones I was relocating. Those plastic pages are really slippery, too, and before long I had them sliding all over.

Fortunately, my feline paperweight was happy to help out.

The worst part was that by the time I was done, I had forgotten exactly how the pages had been secured into the albums. There is a little flap that attaches to the back cover, and you have to do it a certain way. And since I had taken both albums apart at the same time, I couldn’t really compare them to see how it was done. I went back on YouTube and found this really nice lady who showed me exactly what to do in a very clear and methodical manner. Not that the first two ladies weren’t nice, but she was the nicest, and to be honest, the most helpful.

Needless to say, this project took days to complete.

I tried to do as much as I could during kitty naptime, because otherwise it was like having a toddler in the room.

You know the rule.

“If I fits, I sits!”

These are the first two when they were finished. They each hold 300 photos.

In this photo, on the loveseat, under the white ones, you can see the first of the two black albums I got. The black ones hold 600 photos each and are now essentially full. This time I left a few blank spaces at the end of some sections in case I find more pictures that fit into the category.

I’m not going to lie and say I finally got to where this was all I had left to put in albums. As soon as I took this photo, I noticed another box sitting there and I looked inside, only to find I had forgotten it was still full! But I was done! Not done, in the literal sense, but done all the same. I packed up the rest of the photos, put them in the sewing room to think about later, and turned my attention toward the problem of where to keep my newly filled albums.

I rearranged some of my sketchbooks (read: put them in the sewing room) and found a place for not only the new albums, but several older ones I had on a shelf in another room.

I’m happy with the way my photo shelf looks now. There are still a few sketchbooks there but I’m sure there will be at least one more album once I finish the rest. Which can be taken two ways: the rest of the photos, and the rest I’m taking from the photos!