Yes, it is true the digital age has created monsters for all of us regarding the numerous amounts of photographs we take and all the easy ways to take them.  So much so, that to save evey photograph taken, we’d need to contact the National Treasury for extra personal storage space!!  Between the cameras and phones, those sent by freinds via email, twitter, instagram and on and on, it can be bewildering come time to figure out what to do with them all.

I am a little ‘old-fashioned’ with my pictures, I love a photo album.  I like the ease of randomly taking an album off the shelf and flipping back and forth through the pictures. Plus, I just like having a tangible picture I can hand out if needed (there are alot of grandparents without computers out there!). Here is a system that works for our family. Once every 4 months or so, I collect the phones and the cameras.  My husband downloads all the content onto a computer we have that is designated solely to photo archiving and storage. You can do this on your regular home computer as well, but it will soon eat up all your memory.  I have my husband do this because he has more patience than I do. It is a simple process, but can take awhile depending on the amount of pictures you are downloading.  Here is the vital step, once they are downloaded, I sit down and delete all non-important, fuzzy, cut-off, terrible pictures.  Be diligent and delete.  Do you really need 4 of the same picture with just the slightest variation between them?  Now, they are categorized on the computer into their separate folders: Fall 2014, Summer 2014, Summer Vacation, etc. Then they are loaded onto a USB stick which I take to a photo lab (this can be done electronically as well – I’m just the type that likes to actually physically bring it).  I don’t print my own pictures, I just have too many.  Now when my photos are ready, I slide them all into photo albums.  These are always in chronological order, Halloween before Thanksgiving before Christmas, and so on.  I like the albums that have a small space next to the pictures in which I just make short comments on such as “Cape Cod 2013” or “February 2013” and I usually put down the childrens ages as well.  I’m the type that looks at a photo album and asks “How old was so and so then?”  So now you have your pictures sorted, organized and handy to look at either on the computer or in an album.  One more thing very important thing to consider.  We all know how vital and important those pictures are to us in documenting our lives.  When my husband is organizing the pictures on the computer, he always, always, burns the pictures to a disk, this disk is taken off site and stored in another location, ie: vacation home, safe deposit box.  This is just one more measure meant to keep those memories safe in case of fire, flooding or any other potential danger, which I hope never befalls you.  Happy picture taking.