I have to be honest; I’ve been putting off organizing my library/office/craft room.  That’s partly because it’s been cold and dark in there throughout the winter (it’s in the basement), but it’s largely because I find it overwhelming!  The room serves so many functions and, although there is plenty of actual space, I have not been able to make the space work for us.  So I’m putting it off a little longer by addressing some sub-projects that fall in this area.

One is organizing sewing patterns.  If you haven’t seen my review of PatternFile, check it out.  If you have lots of sewing patterns, you will love this software.  It’s what I looked for, for years before I finally found PatternFile.

Organizing Negatives

The other is organizing photos.  Yikes.

Most of us have lots of negatives lying around.  There are two primary ways to handle these (besides just throwing them away, which I don’t really recommend, in most instances).  1) You can organize the physical negatives.  2) You can digitize the negatives and organize the files.

To organize the physical negatives, you’ll want something archival.  Get Smart Products makes some great negative storage sleeves that keeps the negatives from gathering dust or sticking together, and binders to keep them in.  These are a reasonably affordable and space-saving option.  These are on my “to-buy” list, but I have to confess I’ve not personally tried them yet.

The other option is to digitize them.  There are a number of at-home scanners that purport to do negatives, but I have yet to hear any positive comments about the quality achieved with any of these.  (I’m not saying there aren’t any that are good; I’m just saying I don’t know of any I can recommend.)  There are highly-recommended services, but they’re pretty pricey.  (At least, they are if you have hundreds of negatives, as I do.)

ScanCafé is highly recommended, and they have a nice “value box” option.  Whatever you can fit into the prepaid box, up to 600 scans, is all one base price, which is 26% less than their regular prices.  It’s still expensive, though, in my opinion, at 22 cents/scan.  This is high-quality scanning, though, with personal attention to scratch removal and any other necessary “corrections” to your photos as they’re scanned.

Organizing Photos

Finally, you have to organize the photos themselves (including files and physical photos if you’re shooting digital and then printing them), and your scrapbooking or “albumizing” process.  For managing digital images, I found some amazing organizational software that I’ll tell you about in the next post.  Right now, let’s talk about the process.

Organizing the Process

I read a book about getting photos scrapbooked quickly.  I don’t remember which book it was; I think it may have been Get it Scrapped, by Debbie Hodge.  It was a well-written guide to setting up a system for planning and executing your albums.  It really simplified things.  It’s worth a read, but the very basics are:

1. Go through the photos.  Decide what you want to scrapbook, and in which type of layout (event page, “about me,” etc.).
2. If they’re digital, get them printed. (Personally, I’ve been very pleased with Winkflash.)
3. At this point, the really hard part — the thinking — is done!  Now “bundle” them according to the pages they will become, and when you have a few minutes, you can just grab a stack and work on it.