Capturing the Memories & Organizing Your Photographs

Many moms find themselves with shoe boxes and storage containers full of photographs that they are going to organize when they get around to it. Then, the next thing you know, their kids are all grown up and the pictures are still sitting in dozens of unorganized boxes. And by this time, the task is way too daunting to even know where to begin.

I told myself when I had my first baby that I was not going to let that happen to me. And fortunately, I haven't! Of course, in the digital days we live in, it is a lot easier for us to keep our photos organized. If we don't want boxes full of unorganized photographs, all we have to do is never print any! But of course, that's not much fun either (and then we just end up with CDs full of pictures instead of shoe boxes full).

So, here's my 5 step guide to how to keep all those pictures you take organized. But first, a few tips for capturing those memories in the first place!

*I recommend having a digital camera and a small, lightweight digital video camera.
*Keep these out and accesible for those adorable moments you want to capture. If your camera is put away in a drawer somewhere, you'll usually miss the moment you wanted to get.
*Keep them fully charged and with plenty of available space on the memory card or video tape.
*A friend of mine gets her video camera out once a month to video her kids so that she has regular intervals of their growth and childhood captured.
*Keep your video times short, because when you're watching them later, it can get pretty boring watching your baby coo for 10 minutes. It is more fun seeing that for a minute, then seeing the next phase of them a month later for a few minutes, and so on and so forth.
*Label everything! (I usually label things based on age, not date, so I don't have to calculate how old my children were in April of 2006.)

Okay, so my 5 step guide to keeping your photos organized!
1. Get Snapfish & download Snapfish Picture Mover

2. Plug in your digital camera every so often or when the memory card is full and download the pictures onto Snapfish
3. Make a back-up CD of them all & label it. Keep them all together in a CD case.
4. Order the pictures you want to put in an album from Snapfish (and delete the pictures off your camera)
5. As soon as you get the pictures in the mail, put them in an album! Don't wait, or you'll end up with too many and they'll be hard to put in order.

Following these steps has made my photo album production and organization of pictures so much easier! I hope it works for you too!