About Photos
Organizing Your New Photos
I like to select the photos I want to display in an album as soon as I have picked up the roll from developing. I select the photos that are clear, but not necessarily the “best.” I hope the photos in my album tell a story about my family, so if the photo of Lauren blowing out her birthday candles is slightly blurry, I crop it and possibly lay vellum over it to help conceal the fuzziness.
Any photos I don’t use in my album I place in an acid-free photo box and file them by month and year. Label the box front with the month and year of the first photo in the box and the month and year of the last photo. (Example: June 2001-December 2001). Store the box in a cool dry place like an indoor closet.
For the photos I selected for my album, I use 4”x6” divided clear sheet protectors by C-Thru. I place the photos in the sheet protectors chronologically, then put the sheet protectors in my album. The photos are now in the album and can be easily viewed until I get an opportunity to place them on scrapbook pages. I like to use at least two photos on a page and save the “single photo per page” option for portrait-quality shots or professional portraits. After I make my photo selection for my album page, I leave the remaining photos in the sheet protector opposite the page so that they can be viewed. This is such a freeing concept for me. I feel so much less pressure to get all of the pictures “in the book.”
Here’s a tip about working on multiple albums: After I began my daughter’s baby album I began to worry that when she was grown and had left home she would, of course, want to take the album that I had created for her and I would be left with nothing! No photos and journaling to remind me of “the good old days” when I am suffering from empty nest syndrome. I came up with the following solution: After completing the magnificent 4 page spread of her First Birthday party I quickly assembled a single page using extra photos and the same papers and journaling on a page for our family album. This takes very little time and I am insured to have something from this period to look at in my old age. I also computer journaled for the 4 page spread and printed it out twice to include in both albums. The same technique can be applied if you are doing multiple albums for your children. Make duplicate pages depicting family vacations and holidays and include them in each album.