Wow, two days in a row! I'm really on a roll now! hehe! I recently had six months worth of pictures printed at Costco, which by the way is the best way to have pictures printed. Not only do they look great but they are only $0.13 a print for 4x6 and their larger prints are very reasonable too. I often have 8x8 and 12x12 photos printed for special projects. And they are usually done in about an hour plus Costco is only about 9 minutes from my house now so it's pretty convenient! But my last order took a day and a half because I had 197 prints done! Now keep in mind that this is July-November... I haven't even touched December yet! So I thought that I would share with you how I organize all my photos that are waiting to be scrapped since I often get asked about this and how I get so much done! So here it is, this is my latest Costco photo order just taken out of the envelope that could barely stay closed...
Stacked all pretty and waiting to be sorted. Now I should tell you that in order to save even more money and to give me some variety for scrapbooking I photoshop all of my pictures that are good enough to print. First I open all of the photos for a given event or topic, then I decide which ones are good enough to be printed at full 4x6. I correct any color that needs tweaked and crop to exact 4x6 so that what I see on my computer is exactly what I get when printed. The rest of the photos get sized and grouped onto a 4x6 canvas so that I either have two 3x4 pictures like this...
or four 2x3 pictures like this... Not only does this save some money in the printing department but then I can fit more pictures onto a layout without having to crop anything important out. With my Maui scrapbook I preplanned all of my layouts with sketches and then cropped the photos to fit the sketches (maybe I will share more on that project someday) but usually I just crop based on the number of photos that I have and the quality of them and then I design my page based on the quantity and size of photos for that subject.
Next I lay out my photos by subject. I should also tell you that when you have pictures printed at Costco from the website at least, if you adjust color at all in photoshop then turn off the auto color correction because it will mess up what you worked so hard to acheive! So here are my piles all spread out...
Then I use one of my favorite things in my organizational arsenal... my Creative Memories Power Sort box and dividers. When I sold the stuff years ago I stocked up on these amazing little boxes and the dividers that go with them. I have one that is dedicated to my in process photos, two big ones for all of the photos left over and the bigger projects that I will get to someday (this is also where I pull photos for my daughters to scrapbook), and I have two more of the small ones for old negatives and photo CD's. You can write on the dividers with a regular pencil and then when you are done with the photos just erase it and reuse it! I always keep the blank ones in the back ready for their next assignment...
So here are my dividers all lined up ready to be paired with their coordinating photos...
Lastly, I place the divider and photos into my Power Sort box. The front section is mostly events like holidays, the middle section is by person which always has dividers for each of us there with general photos of that person so that when I want to scrapbook about a story, say maybe a funny thing the boys did, then I have photos of them to go with it that don't have anything to do with a special event. The back section is for other events or places that we go like Disneyland.
So there we have it, this is how I organize my photos. When I get some time to scrapbook I just go to this box and decide which subject sounds like fun to work with that day. Some days I feel like tackling the bigger projects like Halloween and some days I just want to do something small with only one or two pictures and more journaling. After I have pretty much cleared it out then I go through and really clean it out and put leftover photos into the bigger boxes but since I started using photoshop and combining pictures I have found that I have fewer leftover pictures which means less to store too!
Stacked all pretty and waiting to be sorted. Now I should tell you that in order to save even more money and to give me some variety for scrapbooking I photoshop all of my pictures that are good enough to print. First I open all of the photos for a given event or topic, then I decide which ones are good enough to be printed at full 4x6. I correct any color that needs tweaked and crop to exact 4x6 so that what I see on my computer is exactly what I get when printed. The rest of the photos get sized and grouped onto a 4x6 canvas so that I either have two 3x4 pictures like this...
or four 2x3 pictures like this... Not only does this save some money in the printing department but then I can fit more pictures onto a layout without having to crop anything important out. With my Maui scrapbook I preplanned all of my layouts with sketches and then cropped the photos to fit the sketches (maybe I will share more on that project someday) but usually I just crop based on the number of photos that I have and the quality of them and then I design my page based on the quantity and size of photos for that subject.
Next I lay out my photos by subject. I should also tell you that when you have pictures printed at Costco from the website at least, if you adjust color at all in photoshop then turn off the auto color correction because it will mess up what you worked so hard to acheive! So here are my piles all spread out...
Then I use one of my favorite things in my organizational arsenal... my Creative Memories Power Sort box and dividers. When I sold the stuff years ago I stocked up on these amazing little boxes and the dividers that go with them. I have one that is dedicated to my in process photos, two big ones for all of the photos left over and the bigger projects that I will get to someday (this is also where I pull photos for my daughters to scrapbook), and I have two more of the small ones for old negatives and photo CD's. You can write on the dividers with a regular pencil and then when you are done with the photos just erase it and reuse it! I always keep the blank ones in the back ready for their next assignment...
So here are my dividers all lined up ready to be paired with their coordinating photos...
Lastly, I place the divider and photos into my Power Sort box. The front section is mostly events like holidays, the middle section is by person which always has dividers for each of us there with general photos of that person so that when I want to scrapbook about a story, say maybe a funny thing the boys did, then I have photos of them to go with it that don't have anything to do with a special event. The back section is for other events or places that we go like Disneyland.
So there we have it, this is how I organize my photos. When I get some time to scrapbook I just go to this box and decide which subject sounds like fun to work with that day. Some days I feel like tackling the bigger projects like Halloween and some days I just want to do something small with only one or two pictures and more journaling. After I have pretty much cleared it out then I go through and really clean it out and put leftover photos into the bigger boxes but since I started using photoshop and combining pictures I have found that I have fewer leftover pictures which means less to store too!
2 comments:
Spectacular and practical guidelines for organizing photos. I always have too many photos on hand (and from "back then"). Thank you!
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