As you are organizing your bedroom and closets, you are probably tripping over photos and keepsakes thinking that you’ll get to those later. The truth is that photos, old VHS tapes and other memorabilia ARE part of the clutter problem that you are trying to solve. Here are three easy things you can do to solve your photo clutter problem.
- Gather your photos together in one spot. We’re probably talking about printed photos and albums, but there are all sorts of other flat things that fall into the same category, like photo Christmas cards, funeral programs and keepsake notes from a loved one. A storage tub like the one in this picture (above) is great for toys…not so great for precious photos. We recommend something like this instead:
2. Give them a quick look to see which ones might be your “A” list items. If you haven’t looked at them in a while, you might easily find that 10-50% of them aren’t actually keepers.
3. Hand them off to someone who will do something with them. There might be someone in your family who would enjoy turning that pile of clutter into something like a book or collage. Or reach out to your friendly APPO.org professional photo organizer to turn that pile into a high-quality gift.
I recently had the chance to work with a new album company, AlbumEnvy, a new album company. They allowed me to highlight my recent Paris trip with one of their beautiful hybrid albums in a 10×10 size. They clearly take pride in their work.
My photos for this project started as digital files, but once you scan that mess in your shoe box, those pictures will be digital, too, and they can turn into a beautiful, space-saving book like you see here.
It’s hard to make a bad photo album of Paris, but this one came out better than your well-known consumer brands, and much better than the corner pharmacy books. If those options are all you’ve ever known, you’ll want to consider AlbumEnvy for your next important project. Their books include layflat pages as standard, with laminated photo pages. The thickness and sheen of these pages are much higher than what you’ve probably seen before.
I chose a cover photo with linen binding, which wraps the linen all the way through the back cover, spine, and 1/4 onto the front cover. It’s a very “library” look. With this binding I wasn’t able to find a way to put an album title on the spine, but I always put the event and year as a caption on the first page, so we still will know when we took this amazing trip, even decades from now.
Making a gorgeous album like this is easy with their software. Most people overthink an album, and never start or finish. That’s when handing off an album project to a professional photo organizer might make sense. You get to enjoy the memories, while someone else does the work (that would be me and my team).
The longer you wait, the more damaged your photos and memorabilia becomes when it’s being knocked around in the back of your closet. While you have the organizing mojo going, start to gather your memories together, separating them from regular household papers and bills, and start enjoying them again. You might actually find that you enjoy this kind of organizing more than fussing with sweaters and socks.
Are you organizing your bedroom or closets this week? This is the challenge that my Facebook Group is working on this week. We’d love to have you join us, and get started on making small or big changes in how you use your space and enjoy your things.
