Organizational Tips: Scrapbook Part 1

This month I am focusing each week's organizational tips on scrapbooking. Each week will focus on a different aspect of scrapbooking from photo and project storage to scheduling time to scrapbook. I am not an avid photographer, but many of my friends, family, coworkers, and fellow crafters are with hundreds of pictures being taken every couple of month. While not all photos being taken on their cameras are worth printing and scrapbooking, many are and like them I have these photos stored on various devices. Photos, whether they are worthy or not, end up taking a lot of space on cameras, phones, tablets, computers, and various other locations in print form. Arguably, photos like anything else, can feel overwhelming when they begin to accumulate. Photos, unlike other items we tend to accumulate, can exist in two forms print and digital. Digital photos can then exist on memory cards, USB drives, CDs, DVDs, phones, tablets, and computers. 

There are many ways to organize photos so these are a few of my favorite organizational tips for photos, print and digital. Tip #1: Gather all of your printed pictures and organize your pictures according to theme and year. Pictures you intend to scrapbook soon should be pulled out and grouped according to your scrapbook page. I will post tips for organizing these photos in week 3. There are a few ways to organize the rest of the photos. The first is a photo box with dividers for years and themes. The second is an accordion style photo folder that is predivided. I use the photo folder for photos likely to be scrapbooked first. This photo storage works ok for me, but I am looking for storage that is resistant to fire and weather damage. This concern over fire and weather damage is why many of my photos are also loaded onto my computer and occasionally on CDs as well. 

Tip #2: Organize digital photos into folders on your computer by year and theme. Pictures on my computer are organized under a large folder labeled Pictures with several other folders labeled inside there. These pictures aren't perfectly organized, but I am happy with the progress being made. The sub folders in the Pictures folder have titles such as Christmas 2008, Easter 2013, and SF Anniversary Trip 2011. I can then organize all of the Christmas sub folders into a larger folder along with other folders for anniversary trips, holidays, and special events. At one point I had organized my photos by the people in the pictures, but this wasn't an efficient means of organization. Bonus Tip: Upload your photos to an online website, like Shutterfly or Photobucket, or load on a USB Drive to protect your pictures from human error and computer crashes.

Tip #3: Organize your USB drives, CDs, and DVDs that contain photos with your print photos. This will save you time when you're looking for a specific print. There are great DIYs for organizing your USB Drives, if you want to see tutorial for one of these DIYs comment below. 

Organizational Tips: Kid's Art Work

Children are wonderful, for so many reasons, but especially for their love of gifts. Children love to create art and pickup little "gifts", which they then eagerly share with the adults in their life. You have probably accumulated numerous pieces of artwork and/or little gifts whether you have kids of your own, have little ones in your family or life in general, or are a teacher of young children. These organization tips are mainly for parents, but can be useful for anyone with young children in their lives. 

Tip#1: Choose your child's favorite artwork or your favorite piece of their artwork and put the pictures in frames that match your decor. Depending on preference you can create an art gallery or hang the artwork in your office. Don't want to display the artwork in frames? Display the pictures in magnetic frames on your refrigerator.

Tip#2: Create files for each of your children. Throughout the year put their artwork in the files. Try your best to record the date, the child's age, and the child's description of their artwork.

Tip#3: Once a year have the child go through their artwork and purge the unwanted art. Choose a number to keep ahead of time. Make a scrapbook of your child's kept artwork. The description of the artwork will be a great keepsake in the future. An alternative to this is photos of the artwork and then creating a photo book on Shutterfly or Snapfish.

Bonus Tip: Photos of your child's artwork can be made into cards or photo gifts for family. Custom thank you cards can be made for each child using their favorite artwork. Parents of young children can type or hand write a standard thank you message and have the child practice "signing" their name. Relatives would love receiving this thank you card.

If you have more ideas of how to store children's mementos or artwork please share your ideas below. Areas of organization you want to see more of in the future? Comment below and I will include tips for those areas in a future post.