Managing Personal Photos: Part 1

As much as I don’t love the cold, I dearly love January. I love the quietness, and the permission to clean up and start fresh. With the wide open year before us, we can dream about new goals and plans and new systems and efficiencies and the chance to get it right. I love the clean inspiration of a new year, and the uncluttered desktop and the fresh notebook and the opportunity to make the year into whatever you want it to be.

One of the things I have vowed to tackle this year is personal photos. My babies aren’t babies anymore, so it’s harder to spot the changes from month to month or season to season. Because of this, and because life is busy, and because we take iPhone photos and stick them on Facebook and  I already spend so much time working on photos at the computer,  the real photos of my family that I want to see, and keep and enjoy instead languish in my hard drives.

But I don’t want them to languish on my hard drives. I want to have them ready to view, and safely printed in a book for my kiddos to laugh at and enjoy when they see themselves over the years. I want to make time for this, since it is one of the most important treasures we have.

You too? Want to join me? I’ve done a fair bit of reading and researching on exactly what I’m going to do, and I’m happy to share that with you. I’m going to go through the process of sorting, DELETING, backing up, storing, printing, creating and  finally? ENJOYING.

My end result is peace of mind knowing that my photos are safe and accessible. If I can spot my children flipping through a book  (or two or ten) of their photos, I’ll know this project was successful. Stay tuned for more on this in the coming weeks!

P.S. Totally by coincidence, I found one of these photos (below) today, and my husband sent me the other. And I just filed them exactly where they are meant to be. A win for the day!

Pre-Will

Baby Henry. Love the diapers halfway up to his armpits.