Organizing Years of Photos

For the past two months I have been wanting to post about how I organized my family's photos in these photo boxes.

4 Words...It took too long!

I organized all the photos from our drawers, ripped family albums, and I even included the photos that somehow always end up on the floor, in between closet space, and what not.

I started off by organizing thousands of photos by year. I thought this way any photo within that year would be easier to find, but because that was just too easy, I decided to organize them by month and by day. It worked out fine from the 1993 photos to the 1998 photos. Then, I realized that all the other photos were dated wrong. Someone always set the camera's date wrong. So I sorted the rest by event and year estimation. TOOK HOURS! Then after 2 weeks of giving a couple hours each day to this project, it was finally done!

This second box, the purple one with polka dots is where all the favorites (in other words, pictures others can see) ended up. Organized by each member of the family. I did the purple box as I was organizing the red box with polka dots using my "system".

After the first couple days, a huge stack of photos still haunted me until I finished organizing. 2 weeks later, I was done. Each day I would spend a couple hours working on it and even took a few days off (It became hard some days).

The finished product made me extremely happy. I was left with the purple polka-dotted box full of our favorite family photos that are approved for guests to go through and the big red polka-dotted box for us to enjoy years from now. All organized and safe from damage.

Now to avoid having to go through this in the years to come, I'm thinking family yearbooks that I want to work with my Mom to put together will showcase and replace all these photographs. Plus, our digital photos won't go to waste. Shutterfly & Snapfish are going to be a huge help on this!
xoxo,