Filing Your PicturesDo you have a good system for filing your pictures while they're waiting to be scrapbooked? Or do your pictures look like this
or this
or maybe this
There are many options available, and you might want to use a combination, but it is important to protect your pictures so be sure you choose at least one!
Popular choices for filing your pictures are Photo Storage Boxes All of those choices are great for filing your pictures and keeping them safe, but my absolute all-time favorite way to file my pictures is something I learned from Stacy Julian a few years ago in her Library of Memories online class at Big Picture Scrapbooking. This system requires some photo albums and some drawers. I use what Stacy Julian recommended in her class and I LOVE it! I use the Pioneer Bi-Directional Leather Photo Albums
These hold a lot of pictures! You can slide a number of similar photos in one slot to save on space, something I really appreciated when I returned from Paris with a ton of pictures of the Eiffel Tower! Another great feature is that with these pages you can file your pictures that are the larger landscape-style using the same page that holds regular size photos (see picture above). These albums are used temporarily until you pull them out for scrapbooking. The idea is to file your pictures according to season (or theme if you have a large batch of photos, like my Paris trip). You don't have to get any more detailed than the season, so this goes quickly... love that! As you're filing your pictures be sure to group similar pictures in the same sleeve. Then label the outside spine for quick reference. For instance, one album might be labeled Winter 1998-1999, and contain all the pictures you have from that time. When you're ready to scrapbook those pictures from Baby Selena's birthday in January of '99, you know which album you need and can look at the pictures without even taking them out of the sleeve until you're ready to use them on your page. If you have extras, instead of filing your pictures back in the albums you can either toss them or file them in the appropriate drawer for later reference and scrapping. The number of albums you would need depends on the number of pictures you take. While these albums can add up if you buy a lot all at once, keep in mind this is a temporary storage and you will be rotating season sets out and new ones in as the bulk of the pictures get scrapbooked or filed in the drawers. Assuming you use an average of one album per season, that would be four albums needed for a year. 20 albums could hold five years' worth of pictures for your family and friends to enjoy while waiting to be scrapbooked! If you want to try filing your pictures this way, use whatever type of album and drawer system you'd like. You could even use the photo boxes or Cropper Hopper as an alternative to the drawers. But being an organizationally-challenged person this is the perfect system for me because even I can keep it going without much thought, and I love the fact that anyone can pick up one of the albums and look at the pictures. I think Stacy Julian is brilliant - can you tell I'm a huge fan?!
Go to Best Scrapbooking Albums
If you try this system out, let me know what you think. Or if you have another system that works for you, we'd all love to hear about it!
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