2012 Spring Cleaning Get Organized Challenge - Challenge #4

Okay, so I'm playing a bit of catch-up here with my blog posts.  I got a little sidetracked by life, so I actually should have posted this one on April 16.  Oopsie.


A Plethora of Pictures

That was this week's challenge.  I have a lot of pictures.  Fortunately, the genealogist side of my personality has been working on scanning them all into the computer.  Unfortunately, there  are still quite a few that need to be done.


I finally went through the box o' crap stuff that I inherited from my mom and found my baby book (I'm the first-born, so mine is actually filled out!), and a bunch of photos of me.  There were also photos of my siblings and other family members as well.


I worked and worked on sorting them all out, deciding which ones I wanted to keep and which ones I wanted to toss keep in a separate bin until the end of time. (You never know when someone else might want one of those photos!)


My photos serve two purposes.  First (and foremost) is my genealogy.  I attach them to each individual in my family tree program.  Second, I use them for scrapbooking.  I usually don't use them in their original size, so scanning and editing works best for me.  Plus, I don't damage the original photo in the process.


Once I had them all sorted, I started scanning like a crazy person.  I got them all done, too.  The renaming and organizing of the scanned photos?  That's another story.  What a challenge!


Using the photos for scrapping necessitates a completely different organizational structure than my genealogy.  So I decided to just name and organize the photos like I usually do, and then I tagged them with a specific event or other scrapbook page idea.  That way, I can just search for all the photos of my daughter at the zoo and voila! all the photos I need will pop up and then I just have to print them in their appropriate sizes.


I made a list of the pages I want to create (thereby also making a list of my tags) and then I proceeded to narrow down the number of photos I wanted to use for each layout by untagging my least favorite.  The hard part there is remembering if I have any other memorabilia that needs to go on the page as well (that's next week's challenge).  Hopefully, I won't have to revisit the tagging/untagging process once I get ready to actually create the layouts.


Unfortunately, I forgot to take any photos while I was doing my photo organizing.  It was quite the yawn-fest anyway.  I can't promise that next week will be any more exciting ... sorting memorabilia and journaling notes!  Wheeee!