My Library of Memories System

My LOM System

Lots of talk going on lately about the LOM [Library of Memories] System brought to us in the scrapbooking world by Stacy Julian via her book Photo Freedom. I love the system and, as she says everyone should, I’ve tweaked it to my own personal needs and wanted to share it with you. So for the next few days I’ll tell you a little about how I organize, scrap,

and yes, PURGE, photos.

LOM - Digital Photo Purging:

I take a gazillion photos – always have, even before digital [can we say 18 rolls of 36 exp film for a one week trip to Colorado – that’s 648 photos! – PRINTED. [And on 250 of those I was trying to capture that one perfectly lone scrub pine tree on a mountain side. ] Thank goodness with digital I don’t have to print all of my photos to find the ones I love. And I can check to see if I got the shot I wanted. And with digital I still take waaaaaaaaay too many photos. With digital I’m known to take ten – plus - shots of the same flower from different angles and settings, and that’s just the beginning. I’m a firm believer in taking a gazillion photos to get that One. Perfect. Shot. – Here’s how I wrangle them up so they work for me –

1] I do not delete from my camera because I often need to see a larger image to determine what is best about a particular shot.

2] Upload all photos to the computer and view them full screen.

3] Go through once and delete all the obviously hideous photos.

4] Go through again and delete the ‘not so great’ multiple shots. I never narrow down a subject to only one shot, but instead tend to keep 6 or so photos of any one subject. [What I like today may be very different from what I like tomorrow, or next week, or next year…]

5] I move these photos to a folder labeled by year – date - event . [See the photos at the bottom of the screen. All monthly folders for 2008 are in the 2008 folder...]

6] We have an external hard drive that backs up everything daily, but I also burn these photos to a couple of disks every few months. [One for home use and one put away for safe keeping.]

7] Every few weeks I also take some of my favorite ‘character / portrait’ shots of my immediate family and copy them to folders labeled with our names. Easily available when I want to do a memory scrapbook page…

More tomorrow...