Don’t you love it when things are easy? I hope you’ll be surprised when you find out that organizing your photos is easier than you think.
OK, not every step of organizing a lifetime of photos is a cinch, but there are plenty of easy bits to focus on for a minute.
In my office, we’ve been working on a lot of de-albuming projects for clients lately. Every single one of us has those awful “magnetic” albums that are full of glue and plastic, damaging our photos. The cool thing? Liberating your precious photos from failing albums takes no technical skills and zero apps. If you love photos but don’t love computers, then this will be a fun part of the project for you. We like to listen to a podcast or our favorite music and just enjoy the process. You get into a rhythm, and it goes quickly. We suggest allocating a half hour per album for de-albuming.
An Easy, Space-Saving Photo Project
You save so much space just by removing the albums and their bulk from your life. Many old albums aren’t in good shape, and they aren’t safe for your photos, so swapping those space-hogs for boxed storage saves at least 50% of the space your albums are taking up.
You’ll save even more space by tossing the duplicates and the duds when you find them. Everybody has duds in their print photo collection. Why? Because back when we paid for film and developing, we keep almost every picture, even the bad ones. I showed you the easy five types of photos you can toss immediately, and you can toss so many others when you de-album. This picture made me laugh in a recent album. This picture is not Photoshopped. This is exactly how it came out of the album, with both faces completely blurred out! Who knows who these people were, but they weren’t album-worthy fifty years ago, and this photo shouldn’t take up space in your home today.
Easy Answers to Sticky Photo Albums
There are only two things wrong with those old photo albums: they either stuck too much, or they didn’t stick at all. If you are really lucky, you have albums like this one where the photos are literally falling out of the pages. Time and humidity have already done most of the work for you. These will take no time at all to remove photos from the album.
The other thing that’s easy about organizing your old albums? They aren’t as organized as you think they are. Most albums are pretty organized for the first half, and then the back half just has random photos stuck in the sleeves. We’ve seen it over and over in client projects…when you had extra pages left over, you stuffed them with pictures that didn’t have anything to do with the original album theme or timeframe. When you liberate the photos, it’s much easier to put photos in date order. And when you see how the plastic has yellowed in the old albums, you’ll be excited to get the photos out and see them clearly.
Easy Photo Date Solution
Speaking of date order, we know you are stressed about getting it right. Can we make it easy for you? Just start by putting your photos in order by year. If you can get more organized than that, by month for older photos, you are doing really great. Relatively few old photos get tagged with absolute and specific days! Often, just getting a photo into the right decade is plenty organized enough for most people. Go easy on yourself! The photo organizing boxes we use (you can purchase the photo archive boxes here) make it very easy to organize by year using the ten interior, removable sections.
The last thing that’s easy about de-albuming? You don’t have to do it at all! If you want to give it a try yourself, my Save Your Photos with SORT and Succeed class has one clear goal: to help you organize your photos to and end up with your first printed photo book. But if you don’t want the hassle, we LOVE to do it for you, so you can just enjoy the stories in the photos without any of the work. If you are ready to get your photos organized, contact HeartWork Organizing. We’ll handle the project from start to finish, from de-albuming all the way to delivering your organized photos right to your phone or computer.
Ready to get started?
