Picture Pefect

My friend and I had a conversation today discussing what we do with our digital photographs of our kids.  I have albums that my mother made for me “back in the day” when you had to develop pictures to actually see what they looked like.  With the convenience of taking pictures digitally, many great pictures get posted to the web or stored on the memory card just waiting for a viewer.

I thought I would share how I manage Adam pictures, because I always love when others share their organizational tips.  Today I embarked on a journey to print 431 pictures from 2009 so that I can put them in a nice photo box to sit and collect dust.  I am so scared that due to the digital revolution, adorable photographs will sit on my laptop never to be viewed by anyone---or, get lost when my computer gets another virus.  What I have done so far is organize my photographs of Adam by year:

From there, I organize each photo into a folder based on the month it was taken.  On Windows, you can learn the date taken on each photo just by holding your mouse pointer over the picture:

 

So that my photos don’t get stuck in Computerland forever, I do several things with them.  I have a chronological 12x12 scrapbook that I do that highlights events throughout the year.  For this, I choose my favorite pictures and do more of the “crafty” stuff, with stickers, backgrounds, embellishments, etc.  Since I can only fit a few pictures per page, I also print all of the pictures from that year and store them chronologically in a photo box (each year has its own box).  I tried to find a 4x6 album to accommodate all of the prints from that year, but I couldn’t find anything of high enough capacity.  Once I know all of the pictures are printed, I then burn that year onto a CD and store that in the photo box as well.  I found that printing all of the pictures from that year forces you to be a little bit more decisive with your pictures.  With the ease of being able to delete so easily with a digital camera, I know I am guilty of taking pictures of things and looking back and thinking "WTF!?"  Suddenly when it comes time to print them all, you can look and say, "There is no way I am paying for six back-to-back pictures of child 1.0 doing the same exact thing."  In the beginning of 2009 when I printed the photos from 2008, there were over 1500 prints (and that was only May-December).  I just got the willpower to go through the pictures from 2009 and there were only 431.  Five more months of photos, yet over A THOUSAND less pictures taken.  I took a peek into the 2010 folder and there are only 355!  As far as the scrapbook is concerned, I am up to summer of 2010 in Adam's album, and tomorrow my friend and I are attending a local scrap night where I plan on catching up on the rest of it.  My biggest joy is that I'll have albums (and boxes and boxes of photographs) to show Adam's girlfriend when he is brave enough to bring her around...I think I'll start with this one: