I have boxes and boxes of photos. I have boxes and boxes of scrapbooks to be filled. Most of those scrapbooks are still in the original wrapping. I have a large stack of blank pages. I have stickers and decorative papers and embellishments of every size, shape, color, and dimension.
All of these have been stored in closet after closet until they were moved into the front bedroom of this house by Big Cuter during Queen T's attack on the office closet in December 2020. They were happy there, resting under Not-Kathy's quilt, covered from prying eyes who might judge the mess.
There are so many other projects to tackle before putting old pictures into albums for humans who are accustomed to viewing them as pixels on a screen. But the photos are archival at this point, so storing them in an old fashioned way doesn't seem too odd. It's just time consuming and messy. It was easy to put off.
But we are refinancing our mortgage and an appraiser is coming to judge us on Monday and suddenly my quiet pile has become evidence that we are poor homeowners..... or something like that..... as TBG implored me to do something, anything, how can I help this look lots better.... and so, today, I began to go through the stash.
I found that there were more than just photographic memories. There were collections from trips gone by. Relics from the 1996 Olympics
playbills from Broadway and Off-Broadway
and maps. There were lots and lots of maps. If I had left that box for my grandchildren to find after my demise they would have wondered about my obvious obsession with maps. I think I saved them to use as background for scrapbooking pages, but they wouldn't know that (look how I've assumed that I never did get around to putting those pictures away).
Not wanting to be remembered as any weirder than I really am, I tossed all of them into the recycling.
There's more work to be done, and a meeting of the minds over where to store the remaining few boxes, but I made more progress today than I have in the last two decades.
I'm quite proud.
Good for you - definite progress! Make sure to scan your photos, at least those going back to your parents or earlier, before you do anything else with them. I've used a fairly reasonable scanning service for many photos (and especially for the negatives and slides), but now am using my 3-in-1 printer to scan photos at home of my kids. I want EVERYTHING on the computer and in the cloud (I can upload my personally scanned photos to the service too) even though I also keep most of the physical photos. I worry about fire season every year and that gets longer all the time. I could probably save my computer but I might not be able to save all the physical photos and albums. In days gone by, before I had a scanner, and you had to take a negative to a store for a reprint, I used the original photos in scrapbooks. So now the only way I can get a copy of that photo on the computer (I've pitched all the negs) is by taking a photo of it on the scrapbook page, and that's just never as good. Sometimes I do wonder why I obsess over organizing my photos since although I have 2 sons I'm never going to have grandkids - but maybe if they're digital instead of physical they may keep more of them. Good luck with your photo organizing quest! (Hope this isn't TMI, just wanted to share what's working for me.)
ReplyDeleteWhy we keep them...the blurry, the who is that, the random foliage.....I do not know.
DeleteWell done. I have albums full of older photos, but I stopped making physical albums some years ago. My photos are now all on the cloud, I hope. I seem to have lost a bunch lately when we had our computer scrubbed. Oh well, I'm probably the only one who would miss them. Many of my photos are now in my blog archives.
ReplyDeleteI stopped scrapbook making too, but now I may start again since everything is so organized.
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I'm sure it makes you feel lighter to have that gone. I've purged photos and just keep prints that really give me joy. All the others are digital. I guess that is the way it will be, no more prints.
ReplyDeleteLighter is exactly the right word!
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