1 Year to an Organized Life July Week Three

This week you can:

• organize your photos
• get creative with digital images

This is a pic of a box that has been under my bed for at least 3 years.  It has mostly pictures but also some programs and postcards that I have kept with the intention of making scrapbooks.  I even have the scrapbooks and pages and embellishments, I just haven't done it!  Now is the time.  This week I'm going to sort everything in here into piles or envelopes as to what book it goes into.  Next month we are going to talk about moving.  Since I am not moving, I am going to use next month to make scrapbooks!  I will still blog about the moving as it is in the book though.

If you have more photos than I do, you might want to get some of those photo boxes that you see just about everywhere.  Remember that the sorting process should go quickly; don't stop and dwell on each picture.  Think of it like the speed elimination we did at the start of each room in our house.  Feel free to throw away photos that you know won't ever make it into a scrapbook!

Maybe you are a generation ahead of me and you only have digital photos.  That's great....but are they organized or do you scroll through iPhoto for 30 minutes trying to find one picture?  Now is the time to make folders and also to delete multiple poses of one picture you were trying to get just right.  Don't forget to back up whatever program you are using to store your photos.  One wrong move or virus and you've lost them all forever!  

You may not be the crafty type and the thought of trying to make a scrapbook makes you nauseous.  No problem, there are a lot of online programs where you can point and click and drag photos until you have created a digital scrapbook.  Then you can either keep it digital or you can order a printed hardcopy.  

I had a coupon for a free 8x8 album from Shutterfly.  I was trying to decide what to do with it because I really didn't want to waste that, when it hit me.  I have recipes on pieces of paper and cut out of magazines in a file.  When I want to make something I have to find that piece of paper....because I haven't finished my recipe binder yet.  I make some things over and over.  So I picked out my top 20 most used recipes and made my 8x8 album with the pics of the dishes that I have on my computer and the recipe to go with it.  You can play with the layout of each page and the size of the pic and text box to make it all fit.  I can hardly wait to get it!  It is in shipping as I speak, er, type.

Now, grab your photos, and let's get this done!!  Let me know how it goes!

Until Next Time.....

Franny