Due to the advent of the digital era, people are taking more photos than ever as a reminder of their unique or fun experiences, which they can then share with others. Capturing a special moment or even something regular on camera is now easier than ever, as most of us have a smartphone handy. However, a frustrating drawback of how accessible and widespread taking photos has become is our tendency to have a disorganized photo collection.
Whether they’re prints or digital, our valuable memories can easily become scattered all over the place, but luckily, there are many creative and effective solutions to save yourself the headache of dealing with a messy photo collection. Sorting out your photos will not only create a tidy office space but also help you spend less time looking for a certain photo and avoid the stress of thinking you’ve lost a fond memory captured on camera.
Sorting Out Your Prints and Preserving Them for Future Generations
Over the years, dust, moisture, and light can seriously degrade and damage your photos. So, the first thing you should do is locate your photos and put them in a clean and dry container. Make sure you keep the photos, as well as other media and memorabilia, away from dust and extreme temperatures. To find what you’re looking for quicker, you can also label the boxes accordingly.
Once prints have their own box, you can organize them chronologically by using important dates or milestones. Alternatively, they can be separated by common themes such as vacations and hobbies.
For efficient print photo organizing, it’s a good idea to use years, then months, and only then days to label your boxes. It’s going to be much easier to locate what you’re looking for in years than just days. Finally, if you want to protect your photos and make sure they withstand the test of time, here are some valuable tips:
- Handle your photos with care every time you touch them.
- Mount them on acid-free paper with photo-safe corners, then slide the papers into polypropylene sleeves.
- Scan photos you want to archive as digital copies.
- Store photos in thick polypropylene envelopes, especially vintage photographs that are printed on albumen paper.
- Don’t group photos together using paper clips.
- Don’t store photos in baggies or any other PVC plastic.
Organizing Your Digital Photos So You Can Easily Revisit Your Favorite Memories
Before you organize your digital photos, it’s a good idea to centralize all the images in one spot. If you only have photos on your phone, a cloud-based app, such as Apple Photos, can make this easier by allowing you to access photos from your phone on your computer. If you can’t find the photo you’re looking for when you need it, it’s almost like you never took it, which makes coming up with effective photo organizing solutions critical. These are just some sorting methods you might find helpful:
- Sort by year: many photo apps use image metadata to keep images sorted chronologically by default, which makes separating them into groups by year relatively easy.
- Sort by occasion: whether it’s your child’s first day of kindergarten or your cat as a tiny kitten, organizing your photos by occasion will make your photo collection less messy.
- Sort by location: you can use your photos’ locations to organize, search, and explore the images you have on your phone based on where they were taken.
Speaking of location, an excellent idea for efficiently organizing your photos is using photo books. You can select the best photos you took during each of your trips, the ones that conjure up fond memories and remind you of the amazing places you visited, print the images, and arrange them into books so that they are more accessible and easier to share with others.
Taking time to organize your photo collection from the first image to the last can give you a great overview of how your life has changed over the past years or even decades. In addition to ensuring a tidy office space, organizing your photo collection can help you discover ideas you may want to revisit and make you acknowledge and avoid past mistakes. Ultimately, if you make sure you have enough time to sort out your photos, it can be a fun and relaxing experience.
Still, if you don’t have time to go through all your photos or have many images to organize, you can hire a company specializing in organizing photos to do the job for you exactly how you want. Organizing photos can be quite an intimidating and time-consuming endeavor, so having a team of specialists assisting you along the way can simplify everything to a great extent.
About the Author
Rachel Arbuckle is the founder of 2000 Paces Photo Organizing, a company that provides authentic, compassionate solutions to turn the chaos of photos and memorabilia into organized collections that can be easily shared and treasured for generations.
