Chances are, organizing your digital photos was/is a bigger challenge, since printed photos have been around for a lot longer and many people already had some method for this already.  But how to organize printed photos is still a dilemma some people haven’t tackled at all, and many of us have only a minimal method in place that could use some polish.

I’m going to assume you’re hoping to scrapbook them (whether in a fancy way or just something simple), because that’s the main reason people have loose pictures sitting around and piling up, so let’s look at a system for organizing them that will enable that to happen with minimal fuss.

Start Broad.

The goal here is to enable us, with the minimum possible effort, to find what we need when we need it, either for looking at or for scrapbooking.  To do that, we’re going to start by organizing the photos broadly, the same way as the digital photos: by year and month.

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You can go as fancy or as un-fancy as you want for storage here, although I definitely recommend ensuring whatever you use is photo-safe so you don’t degrade your pictures.  Personally, I prefer a plastic container with a lid that latches, just because it’s a bit more protected against spilling something on it or spilling the pictures out of it, but a simple shoebox-style photo box will work, too.

All of the photos from a given month should go in a stack.  Put them all in a single smaller container or behind a single tab, and then group all twelve months into a larger container for the year.

Further Divide One or a Few Months at a Time

Once all of the photos are in yearly sections, subdivided by month, you can start to drill down the organization for one or a few months at a time.  (How large a block of time you choose will depend on how prolific a photographer you are!)  What you want to do at this stage is to further divide the images for the month(s) you’ve selected, into events (or whatever groupings you would put together as a single page or set of pages in a scrapbook).

Depending on what type of containers you’re using for organization, you can either keep these within the same system, or you can put each group of photos into a page protector in your “working” photo album.

The idea is that, at this point, if you decide you want to work on your scrapbooks, you can easily pull out a stack of photos that go together and know you have them all together, without having to stop and sort first. 

(I would recommend that you not subdivide all of your photos like this within your main photo storage, but subdivide one set, and leave the rest with only the year/month groupings until all the subdivided ones have been put in photo albums, then go back and sort the next group, etc.)

What About Images That Aren’t Event-Based?

What if you have pictures that you want to put in your scrapbook by subject groupings, and they aren’t all from the same date?  There are a couple different ways you could address this.  If you want, you could flip through the entire collection of year/month-sorted photos, pulling out the ones that group together like this, and then put them in their own designated section.

A less labor-intensive option would be to pull them as you go.  Say I wanted to make a scrapbook page of all of my baby’s “x months old” images.  I could sort and scrapbook all the event-based images from when the baby was a month old, pulling that one-month photo out and tucking it in its own section/page/box with a note that specifies what it’s for so I’ll know when I have them all.

Later, when I’m scrapbooking all the images from two months, I’ll pull out the two-month photo and add it to that section/page/box.  And so on.  By the time the year’s photos are all done, that set of photos will grouped and ready for me, without the need to do any extra work.

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What About Other Stuff for My Scrapbooks?

A discussion of organizing and prepping photos for scrapbooking would not be complete without discussing the other “stuff” that we save for scrapbooks — ticket stubs, locks of hair, etc.  Because if you don’t know where to find the ephemera for the page when you pull out the photos, you can’t take care of them.  Or if your ephemera is a mess, you don’t know whether you have it all there and don’t have the confidence to move forward with the pictures.

I sort my miscellaneous items like this the same way as everything else — broadly by date.  I tend not to have nearly as much of this stuff as I do photos, so a single folder per year works okay for me.  If you have more, or just want it better-sorted for ease of use, go ahead and do one for each month.  Make sure they’re labeled.

More importantly, make sure the stuff is labeled.  If it doesn’t have a date printed on it (like a ticket or a program), be sure to note the date, because you might not remember later!  (If you’re using a digital photo inventory, this is a good use for the “notes” column — make a note beside the photos that you have _____ to go with them.)