I’d love a dollar for every time someone has said how foolish it is to not get your best photos printed because it’s so easy to lose digital copies, then done nothing about my own growing collection. I’ve had a digital camera for about ten years now. Though I’ve managed to get some holidays albums done, I’ve not been printing out photos of events and people. I’ve still got two holidays to catch up on as well as a fuzzy idea about printing and framing a collection of favourite arty photos to hang in the stairwell.

So how to sort out ten years worth of photos? Well, thanks to Pinterest, and a blog post pinned by my friend Margaret, the task has gone from too-enormous-to-contemplate to large-but-possibly-do-able.

I’ve modified and reordered the list in the post to this:

1. Consolidate into one location
Which I was in the habit of doing anyway, but Paul’s photos are, naturally, in his own computer/backup system so we’ve set things up so my computer can access them.

2. Group by year, event/subject
I’ve not bothered grouping them by month as well because that would split up holiday pics. But I’ve added folders for ‘garden’, ‘house’ and ‘cat’.

3. Cull
The previous step revealed that I’d been storing some photos in two places, and so had a lot of duplicates I could delete. I haven’t got to the serious culling yet. The process of picking photos from a holiday trip or event to post in blogs means I’ve already got a system of moving photos into a ‘working’ or ‘rejects’ subdirectory, so I should only have to cull those subdirectories.

4. Additions
Do I want to scan old photos, documents or ephemera to add to an album? Or photograph objects to include? Or add clippings or con books?

5. Backups
The original blog post puts this one at the end. Personally, I think the sooner backups are done the better.

6. Divide & Conquer
Decision time. Holiday photos are best put in dedicated albums. I’m considering making convention and writer scrapbooks with clear pockets for ephemera and clippings, constructed in a way that allows me to add more pages. One of the reasons I haven’t done an album of the author tour I did in 2011 is because three quarters of the pics are the sort you’d put in a writer scrapbook and the other quarter are holiday pics. They don’t mix well, so I think I need to separate them.

The most useful idea I gained from that blog post was of doing annual albums. I never know what to do with personal pics of personal events, parties, the house and garden, the cat, family, etc. They used to go in an ongoing album of general stuff that I was never very good at labelling so I’d eventually forget dates and places. If I did a small album each year using one of those album printing services I might be able to keep up.

7. Design & Print
While I do enjoy making interesting albums using bookbinding methods, getting around to it is a problem. I could probably use album printing services for holiday pics. Where I’d like to design my own format is for convention and writer scrapbooks, using a japanese stab or post binding method so I can add more pages later. A bit like the New Zealand photo album I did a few years back.

So I have a plan, and an overwhelming task divided into smaller manageable ones. Since I’m entering a pretty busy work time I’m not setting any aims for getting all my photos sorted any time soon. But at least it seems do-able now.