I love pictures.
If you’ve dropped by here even just a few times, you may have figured that out. I like taking them, I like having them, I like the memories they create.
I also like and appreciate all the pictures friends and family have given us over the years.
Many years ago, I was at my aunt’s house and we were looking through some of her old picture books. She had made books for all her nieces and nephews and grouped each person’s pictures together. As the years went by and we nieces and nephews grew, you could look at the timeline of photos and see the changes.
My photo books containing my photos from Christmas cards and from friends and family were needing some organization and help anyway.
I decided I wanted to tackle this project and start books with families and kids grouped together. I really, really liked how you could watch them grow up in pictures.
My Mother had used three-ring binders to put pictures of the grandchildren in, so I combined the two ideas.
I made separate binder books for each of my kids and each of my nieces. Recently, with four new baby girl nieces on M’s side of the family, I’ve started books for each of them, as well!
Then I made a book for M’s side of the family, one for my side and one for friends.
It has turned out as a great thing for me and my picture collections!
And just like my aunt’s, it is fun to see how people have changed from year to year.
For my kids’ and nieces’ books, I used a variety of binder pages. I have 8×10 size sheets and 4×5 sheets and wallet sheets. The wallet sheets were labeled for sport card collecting, but wallets work just right. I have all sizes of pictures of these close-to-us kiddos. And more pictures of them too!
For extended family and friends, I made the pages differently. Many of them we only receive pictures from at Christmastime. Some are a variety of sizes. Some we have pictures from every year, some just a few or every now and then.
I used all 8×10 protector sheets and then took white printer paper and pasted or placed the pictures on top of this inside each clear protector. When I’ve filled a family’s sheet, I just start a new one and put it in the binder next to the filled one.
I had just piled all our Christmas pictures in a basket for the last two or three years. Earlier this year, I pulled the basket out, sorted the pictures by family and got them placed in their binder pages and got my books caught up. It really didn’t take that long to catch them up. In one way, I think it was almost as fast to do more than one year at a time compared to placing just one year’s pictures. I would find the proper spot and put in all the pictures I had for that particular family. I was looking up each place whether I was putting in one picture or three! It sounded good anyway! Turned my procrastination into organization and planning and time management! 😉
My kids love looking through our photo albums, but I just need to do a better job of printing off photos to put in them. This is a great idea on how to organize your photos. Thanks for linking up to the Country Fair Blog Party!
I know what you mean. Choosing pictures and uploading them and having them printed just takes some time! I love to take pictures, but can procrastinate when it comes to getting them off my camera and backed up. Probably partly because I take too many. 🙂