My Library of Memories System

LOM - Old Photos & Cold Storage

Old photos – what do I do with the millions of old [and admittedly pretty rotten] photos? When I started the LOM I was actually dreading this part a bit – as I’ve said before – I have lots of photos from the last 30 years or so. For many years I kept all my extra photos in some generations cases – mostly organized by year & season. I knew I’d need to set aside time to go through all of those – and this task was complicated by the fact that I kept finding photo envelopes scattered throughout our house full of photos from the last five years [since moving and putting my generations cases in a hard-to-get spot…] I got started this way:

1] I set aside 30 minutes at a time to work on photos –

2] I went through a group at a time and ruthlessly purged; sending some to the trash and others that might be duplicate or not deemed scrap-worthy to cold storage [I re-used my generations cases for this.]

• I was pleased to see that when I took out at least one of my old photo storage cases that the photos were already organized by person and not year. So at least ten years of photos were already half organized for me. [Somehow several years ago I’d decided this type of organization would work better in finding photos of those we loved for those who come behind me.]
• I purged ruthlessly – and trashed many of my not so great photos [and of course the pretty rotten ones were first to go!] I do not feel the need to keep every single printed photo of my children. My reasoning? I have many, many excellent photos of them at every stage of their lives and simply don’t need the bad ones. If that photo of a little red dot [their jersey color] on the soccer field was the only photo I had of them, then, yes, of course I would keep it. But that’s not the case with me, and I doubt it is for you either…
• I pulled the ‘best of the best’ of these photos and placed them in the LOM boxes that I’ve talked about previously. I’ve always scrapped events from my children’s childhoods and I’ll admit that there are [many] times when I’ve chosen to go back and scrap memories of those time and the ‘best of the best’ may already be in their scrapbooks. What to do? I simply scan the photo and print a couple [one to scrap and one to put in my LOM box in case I want to use it again…]

3] I went through all of the photos a second time and sorted photos into categories for my LOM system. Everyone's categories will be different - especially in the 'Things We Do' category. Lots of church, camping, soccer, drummer, fishing, scrapping, sailing, etc. in this one for us...

4] Made dividers that were appropriate for our lives and filed the photos.

5] I know these will be full one day [soon!] and I’ll have to do another purge to cold storage.

More tomorrow....