Photo Storage: Part Dos


I began brainstorming waaaay back in May about a way to effectively store and preserve our photographs.

Here were the original problems-
1. I have a bunch of loose photos that desperately need organization.
2. Digital pictures-they're organized but not secure. If our computer crashes, there is external hard drive failure, or something happens to the house, all our pictures would be gone.


I have finally bit the bullet and decided to start going through all the loose pictures. They date back to the 90s. Back to middle school. And there are some random baby pictures of Josh and I mixed in with all that. Because half of all the pictures printed were from film cameras, there are so many pictures that are printed that just aren't good or I don't remember the people in them. So I purged the ones that are not necessary to keep. 

Next I began sorting them into years. This is quite the long process. These pictures have just been thrown in a box over the years. I actually have a "?" pile because I have no idea when they were taken. I'm hoping my mom can help shed some light on that this weekend. Or we can use the process of elimination to figure it out. 



By the way- I bought these bins on amazon. Pricey? A little. Priceless? A lot. They are PERFECT for this project. All the little bins inside the bin just make this so easy to use. When the bin arrived at my door, I was a little disappointed in how small they were. I was expecting a plastic shoe box size. In reality it's about 3/4 the length of a plastic shoe box. BUT in my opinion much easier to store than this bulky one. If you have the space to store the big one, it would work great. But I don't. The end. 

After sorting the pictures into years (and I'm still not done with this part), I printed off some REALLY cute labels from teacherspayteachers.com. By the way- even if you aren't a teacher you can go there. And they have a TON of free stuff. 
Bonus?? Most of the things you can manipulate to make them work for you. (now I would NEVER try to sell these manipulated labels- that's basically stealing. But for home personal use this is totally ok).

Example? (sorry these are grainy- they are shots of my computer screen)
I started with the original labels.
Brought it over to Powerpoint.
Then I covered the letters with a shape box.
And filled in the blue shape box white (omitting the line around it)

Now that is a perfectly beautiful label!

After re-sizing, I could actually fit 2 on a slide. Then I just printed the slide onto cardstock. If you wanted these to be sticky, you could print them on a "full sheet" label.

I am having an issue with having a lot of leftover space in some of the bins.
Once I'm done sorting the box, I will decide if there are some years that I will be able to combine. That will help stretch the $$ just a little farther. I will possibly need 2 more of these bins to hold everything, but I'm hoping that by combining them, I'll be able to get away with just 1 more for now.

I haven't figured a solution for backing up digital files. I'm not interested in an online backup system. I am considering buying a huge SD card, or something similar to copy all our photos onto and store in the safe. That way I can still have access to the ones on our external hard drive, but if anything were to every happen to our computer/hard drive at least our memories would be preserved.

This is still a work in progress so in 4 months I may update how things are going again ;) For now I'm just going to focus on sorting, trashing, and consolidating!

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