Help with organizing photos

[swsoup]

I have felt in over my head with our family photos for some time now. My kids are 12 and 10 and I really haven't organized my photos in any way. I have a couple boxes full of the "old fashion" photos (produced by film) and thousands of photos on our computer from our digital camera. A few months ago, it looked like our computer crashed. I re-loaded the photos and now I have 22,000+ photos, many of which are duplicates. It's a tedious process, but last night, I deleted 5,000 duplicate photos. I plan to continue sorting through these.

I'm not too crafty and I don't have a ton of extra time, so scrap-booking doesn't feel like a good option. Should I create photo books through a service like Shutterfly? Should I do one family book per year?  About how many photos should I include per year? What website do you recommend (like Shutterfly)? Can I easily scan our prints into digital photos?

We have a Mac, so we have Photo Library and Photo Library Copy. I'm really not sure the difference, but a few months ago, I got rid of the Photo Library Copy and that's when the photos were deleted....

Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

[lanamommyphd07]

[LeighPF]

I love the digital photo books. Artscow.com is my favourite. You can be fancy, or you can just be basic and it still looks great

I really like the idea of doing a yearbook. Easy to get your head around. Quick notes of this is X's 4th b Day. this is NYC in May...

I just finished Happier at Home and one of her ways of making herself happier was to spent 15 minutes a day catching up on all the photo work. She know having them nicely presented made her happy and not having the job hanging over her head as a giant cloud did too. I think this is one of my 2013 missions (My 19 month old still has no baby book).

When I was in high school, my brother and I got monthly chores that we chose. One month I sorted a decade of backlogged photos and stuck them in albums for my mother. It made us both very happy.

[spughy]

Oh, I so need to do this, too.  We have some printed photos in a box, some on CDs, some on photo-saving sites, some on a drive in a computer that's dead, some on the current computer... and just too, too many overall!

I need to go through all of it, weed out the redundant, boring or just not-so-good ones and organize them, before kid #2 arrives and makes the situation worse...

My plan is to sort the printed photos first, organize them into albums (one per year?) and then move on to the electronic copies and slowly print the good ones out for albums.  Looking at albums from my childhood is still one of my favourite things to do when I go home to visit.. I'd hate for DD and kid-to-come to not have that experience.

[lanamommyphd07]

I've been wanting to put together photo/story books for DD using something like shutterfly, but does anyone have a "better" option for something like this? I'm going to be sorting the memento boxes from DDs first year and hopefully walking away with it all digital. (!?) Like, a scrapbook type of thing but mostly for photos and long captions that could be printed as a book?

[Oliver's Mama]

Originally Posted by lanamommyphd07 

I've been wanting to put together photo/story books for DD using something like shutterfly, but does anyone have a "better" option for something like this? I'm going to be sorting the memento boxes from DDs first year and hopefully walking away with it all digital. (!?) Like, a scrapbook type of thing but mostly for photos and long captions that could be printed as a book?

I love love love MIxbook.  Your options are limitless as far as how many pictures, layouts, sizing, editing, and text... you can totally do whatever you want, unlike other photo sites where you're limited to fixed fill-in-the-blank tempates.  I didn't try, but I don't see why you couldn't do an entire page of text if you really wanted. And the quality is superb.. It's more expensive, but they have sales.

[crunchy_mommy]

I think the cheapest & easiest route would probably be a basic, traditional photo album. Have everything printed (preferably the same size as your existing prints) and buy a few cheap photo albums and slide the photos in, the kids could help too & it could be a fun family activity. I love the idea of photo books but for me that would take a LOT longer (because I'd feel compelled to design it a certain way etc.) plus you are really limited in the number of photos since more pages can get costly. So for me the pocket photo albums made it much more manageable. I have to get on this & do it again though, it's been almost 2 years!

[Oliver's Mama]

I should say, when I do the printed photobooks, it's to provide a "snapshot" of our lives, not every single picture.  I keep digital copies of everything, but our photobooks are maybe a 1/2 inch wide and each spans 3 years (probably no more than 10 pages per year)  So it takes up very minimal space, is probably just as cost effective as traditional albums, and I don't get tired of looking at the 30th picture from a bday party.  Less is more.  So the space of one traditional album can now hold at least 10 years worth of pictures, and I don't feel bad sitting down with the album with someone, like we're commited to flipping through the phonebook.

But when the kids are getting really curious, we pull up a slide show on our tv monitor so they can see every single last picture we've ever taken. so we're covered.