Organizing the pictures you want to scrap

julifish

julifish

New member
Okay ladies - tell me your secrets of organization. I have years of photos on my hard drive (like 17 years worth). My kids each love their paper scrapbook albums but for Katie it only went up to age 4 and for Hannah it went up to age 1. I need to fill in the years and get them completed books.

How would you recommend going back and logging which events/pics I've already scrapped and which ones still need to be done? Any of you mega organizers have a plan for me??? I'm not so great at this kind of stuff. But when Katie leaves for college next summer I'd like to have the majority of her childhood scrapped and printed and in a book ready to go with her (if she wants it - or perhaps print a book for her and keep the originals here with me).
 
Do you use Lightroom at all? If you use lightroom - there are some "quick" ways that you can organize in there if you have a lot of photos to do.

I am trying to do books for each kid that are just one for their childhood (so majorally narrowing it down to just highlights, they will have other books and albums as well this is more of a "as we moved around when you were a kid I want you to remember each place you lived" album so I have folders for each kid - and then in each folder, a folder for each place we have lived, then in that folder - each category I am using that I'll put pictures (now I'm going back to add, I'm hoping that for this place I can add them and save myself some time). I don't know if that would be helpful
 
I do have Lightroom and I have tagged all of 2008 and 2009, but I just tagged by event and child's name. I did not pull out the digital pages I've done and mark if I have or have not used that event/pics yet.

LR moves kind of slow for me. Does it move slow for everyone else too?
 
I'm pretty simple - I have a folder for each year and subfolders within each year for each month. When I'm done scrapping a photo it goes into a folder labeled "SCRAPPED" - LOL - I told you I was simple!

I still have photos of Cheyanne from birth up to present and I'm slowly picking away at them. A lot of my paper albums are falling apart so I've been scanning those photos to scrap and get them all into digital albums/photobooks.
 
I have have a great organizing system for my pictures...
My problem is that my life vs scrapping ratio is unbalance...
Either I stop taking pictures or need to scrap more... LOL
 
i also make a folder of each year with subfolders of the months.
when we go on a vacation or a few days to disney or so.
i make a folder with subfolders of each day with the date.

when i choose photo's for my sons album, i made a map for each year i wanted to scrap and copy photo's from the years and events i already had on my laptop and choose from those
 
I've been using Aperture instead of Lightroom so I think they call them collections instead of albums but I use a mix of Smart Albums, Albums and flags for big projects. The Smart Album pulls in the photos for a certain date range I've set, then I flag any photos I want to scrap and drag them into an album. So for example with Week In the Life, I had a Smart album for the photos I took that week and then albums for each day and part of the day (morning/noon/night) made up of the photos I flagged. You could also use tags to mark which photos you have or haven't scrapped and then filter them so you don't see everything at once.

For big projects , I also find it helpful to make a progress chart so I can see where I'm at with each stage of the project. So for example, you might have events/stories you want to scrap down the left side of the chart and then things like, photos chosen, photos edit, products chosen, layout scrapped, saved for print across the top. Then you just check off as you go so you know where everything stands.
 
Lightroom was moving super slow for me for a while - then I started having issues with my external hard drive (where I was pulling all the pictures from) it crashed, and turned out that was a lot of the problem for me - that was only realized after lots of trying to trouble shoot, reload the whole program, being sure I had defragged disk space, etc. etc. So sad and frustrating (thank goodness for backblaze! I didn't lose anything but took me a good bit to get everything re-downloaded).

I was going to suggest colored flags or smart albums possibly. But if it runs super slow or even slow - that would probably be more trouble than it's worth. I probably would just go old school and copy pictures into a new folder if you have the hard drive space - and yes a timeline/chart would definitely be on my list of tools too!
 
I'll just refer you to my SugarBabe Sunday Blog post I did about getting photos scrapped and organization. I tag all mine in ACDSee, but Year & Month, then I break them down even more from there. I'm very anal on how I organize, I always print chronologically, but if I jump around, I still know what needs to be scrapped. I currently have Oct-Dec 2014, December 2015 & January 2016 to scrap. I'm completely caught up otherwise from Keira's birth, so just about 10 years photos. https://www.sweetshoppedesigns.com/index.php/2015/07/sugarbabe-sunday-712/
 
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my hubby wrote a software program to pull in the title of each layout into a spreadsheet for me... then I can see which photos I scrapped and didn't since I name my files by date.

Then I go through the year and pull what photos I want and put them in their own photo... now I am behind a few years on that. :blink: But I label them with a topic so that when a CT kit come up I can see if I have any photos for that topic... I have even gone so far on some of putting them into a template... but like I said, I'm really behind - I only have that done for a few years and I loved it, when I did that... that is my goal to get there again - when I finish a few projects I've started in the last 4 years... :p
 
I just put it the way Marie mentioned above, except that I don't tag whether or not I've scrapped it. Sometimes I do scrap the same photos several times and I am fine with that :)
 
If I were trying to scrap an entire childhood in one album, I would do it pocket style (or maybe one side regular/big photo and one pocket like Mel does) and choose a set number of pages for each year (4? 6?).

I would include a birthday photo/collage, a brief 'this is what you accomplished this year,' a family photo, a school photo, and fill in the rest with whatever happened that particular year (sports, vacation, etc.)

I would do them ALL the same so I didn't get overwhelmed + it will look nice and cohesive in the album.

I would use the exact same pages and just switch out my other kid's photos and info.

Only after THAT would I worry abt scrapping other ' lesser' events in a separate album.

HTH!

Sent from my HTC One V using Tapatalk
 
MamaBee said:
my hubby wrote a software program to pull in the title of each layout into a spreadsheet for me... then I can see which photos I scrapped and didn't since I name my files by date.

Then I go through the year and pull what photos I want and put them in their own photo... now I am behind a few years on that. :blink: But I label them with a topic so that when a CT kit come up I can see if I have any photos for that topic... I have even gone so far on some of putting them into a template... but like I said, I'm really behind - I only have that done for a few years and I loved it, when I did that... that is my goal to get there again - when I finish a few projects I've started in the last 4 years... :p
Click to expand...

Well no wonder you have a photo for every kit ever made. I probably do too, but don't know it. :)

I decided to start with pulling the layouts in to LR and tagging them by month, year, and child's name. Then I will see what I have for each kid and go back and figure out what I need to fill in.
 
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