This trip to Japan we did over Christmas was 100% holiday, which is, I suspect, why we launched into sorting photos as soon as we got home while photos from the half-work-half-holiday trips to Europe have languished in forgotten directories of the computer. And it’s probably that we were in Japan for eight days, not several weeks. Not long enough to be a little bit sick of the subject.

Another reason we have a bit of a backlog of trip albums is because the last few none were straightforward.

New Zealand 2012
It was a short trip and while we took some photos that would be nice to have printed, there’s really not enough for a full album.

European Tour 2011
I’ve not been able to decide whether to combine or separate the photos from book events and holiday snaps. Also, since we snatched a few days for looking around wherever the tour took us, it’s mostly big batches of photos in cities dotted around Europe, with lots of photos of things in museums and galleries that I took mostly as reference shots.

Mini Tour 2013
Ditto – except this time we spent ten days driving around the south of England so the non-work pics are mostly of that time.

Getting all these albums sorted was going to be a big project, so I’ve broken it down into smaller tasks, starting with a small one: the New Zealand photos. I decided to simply add some pages to the end of the album I did for our 2008 trip.

Which works except for that big “08” on the cover. Maybe I’ll make a new cover.

I love that this album can be added to so easily – which gave me an idea that could sort out our album situation not just now, but in the future.

Why not have one album for each region or country rather than each trip, and then keep adding to them? I’m bound to do more of these work trips to Europe for work and I’ll just insert more pages in the album each time. We considered the Japan trip a ‘taster’ and intend to go back in a few years so we can add more photos to that one when we do. This also gives me a reason to print all the nice photos from the short holidays and day trips we’ve done locally: they can go in an ‘Australia’ album.

However, what I don’t like about the New Zealand album is that on the pages that contain several small photos I have to mix and match pics. Large pages cost more to print so if I have one photo that won’t fit or doesn’t match the rest I leave it out, even if it’s a good one. One photo per page makes the selection easier as nothing needs to match. Like in these albums I made for our Canada trip:

Which are great for when you’re showing people the photos, as four separate albums means four people can be looking at the same time.

To keep them together, the Canada albums live in a box. The New Zealand album has one, too, which gives me somewhere to put the bits and pieces I collect – brochures, tickets, etc. That led to me hitting on an even better solution: a box per country or region.

Now I have the best of both systems. I’m going to make A5 albums with one photo per page (two fit snugly side by side in the box) that I can keep adding to, and keep everything to do with trips to that country or region in one box, including my trip diary.

I got the pages printed for the New Zealand trip and added them to the album before I thought of this idea, so that album will stay in the large format. The rest will be smaller. I’m going to tackle the Japan album next as the pic selection is nearly done. I have a Photoshop template ready, I just need to figure out what to make the cover out of. Something flexible that doesn’t need glueing, as book cloth is a faff to work with and anything glued needs to spend ages being pressed while drying.