When I was first trying to figure out how to organize my own photos, I was inspired by this post.  I quickly found that if I waited to go through my folders until I had the time to do all the editing I might want to do, I fell behind, but that it only took me a few minutes to go through the folder(s) for any given month and list what was there.

The immediate benefit to this is that I could keep up with what I had or hadn’t edited/printed and didn’t have to keep starting over.  And later it’s a benefit because I can scrapbook my pictures without having to go back through years’ of images trying to figure out what the date  was for a particular one.

I thought you might like a little more detail, though, about what my list looks like, so here’s an example:

April 2013

baby shower (4/6)
misc. photos of the girls (Liv w/ bunny, Liv in Packers, Liv in shoes, calling through grate)
37 wks pregnant (4/10)
painted plates
flowers in the yard (4/12)
out for a walk (4/12)
Caleb’s name (4/12)
art journaling (4/21)
cherry/apple blossoms (4/22)
____ wks pregnant (4/22)
____ wks pregnant (Packers) (4/24)

4/6                    4/18
4/9                    4/21
4/10                  4/22
4/12                   4/24
4/15                   4/28
4/17                   4/30

sev extras of Ari’s pics
(didn’t print flowers)

This is pretty much exactly what my list looked like for April (except those two notes on the bottom were actually hand-scrawled off to the right of the dates).  Here’s how it works, and why:

The top section, perhaps obviously, is a list of the subject matter of the month’s pictures.  I noted the dates when I thought they would be relevant to me for scrapbooking.  Some of them I don’t need exact dates for, so I didn’t bother.  (A couple of these are actually only there so I can find the photos again later if I want them for something else.)

I don’t put things on this list that I don’t expect to need again.  For instance, if I take product pictures for a blog review*, I don’t list them here (unless for some reason I want them in my photo album).  This portion of the list is for use when I’m ready to scrapbook the pictures.  It saves me having to figure out all over again when a given picture or group of pictures was taken.

The dates at the bottom are all of the folders I have for that month in my photos folder.  So in this case, I took pictures on April 6th, 9th, 10th, 12th, 15th, 17th, 18th, 21st, 22nd, 24th, 28th, and 30th, and all were downloaded into their respective folders.  This portion of the list is for me to keep track of what I’ve printed.  When I order prints of the pictures in a given folder, I check off the date.  (Occasionally, there is a date where I don’t need any of the images in the folder printed.  In this case, I just put an X beside it instead of a checkmark.)

And then the notes are for when I need extra copies of something, when there’s something special I want to print in an unusual size (which means I’ll have to order it – and, thus, check it off – separately), etc.  So in this case, I wanted extra copies of a couple pictures of my daughter (for her to put in her own album), and I wanted to make note that I didn’t print the pictures of the flowers in our yard from this month (decided I didn’t need them).  Other months sometimes note that I need, for instance, a 5×7 of something.  When I get those printed, I check those off.

These lists are to be stored with the printed pictures.

*I actually give these their own subfolders.  So they are called BLOG-2013-08-28, or whatever.  That keeps them separate from my regular “family” photos.