35: How do you get photos under control?
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Welcome to episode 35 of Permission to be Messy. I'm your host, JoAnn Krall and today I'm talking about photos. Both physical photos and digital photos. So many people. Tell me how overwhelmed they are by photos, even people who are organized in every other area of their lives. If you're older like me, you have a ton of physical photos and you have a ton of digital photos. and digital is starting to out pace the paper ones for people of our age. And when I say our age or my age, in your fifties.
The first thing I'm going to say is you want to chip away at them. I feel like a broken record, but I cannot stress it enough. And this episode, this week is inspired by a friend of mine who shared that she was organizing her photos, but under not so happy circumstances, she was looking for photos of a friend who is ill. And, she thought had, I just been keeping up with this, it would've been a lot easier to find.
And she shared with me that she probably should be tackling it a little at a time because mentally can only handle so much because photos bring on a lot of emotions. Some happy and some sad.
Very similar to the way I handled paper and digital files. I do the same process with photos, collecting. making sure that you're being mindful of what you're taking, and then, chipping away at them and then grouping them and then, thinking about a system going forward.
Let's talk physical photos first. Today, you can start just by gathering them all up. Now you may have all your physical photos gathered up in one spot and that's awesome because then you're ready to start chipping away at them. But if you don't, start trying to gather them, it's hard because sometimes people will give us photos along the way and they get tucked in with paperwork. But, get as many as you possibly can in one space, you really want to do that same process of looking at each photo and deciding whether you want to keep it. Now with physical photos this, can be a challenge if things are a complete mess, because we never want to let go of a photo and think, oh, that was the only photo of my grandfather But when you're first going through your photos, These are the photos that you can get rid of. Anything that's blurry. Unless, of course that one blurry photo, is the only photo you have of a loved one. Photos with people's head cut off unless they make you laugh. That's fine. photos that don't have anybody in them. You know, those scenic photos that we take on vacation. We probably don't need 50 from one vacation. A few may suffice to give you a, an overview, because think about it when you're gone. handing somebody a box of a thousand photos. Isn't really a pleasant feeling to receive. if you could give somebody like the highlights of your life, how awesome would that be? So think about that. and then, If you're the type of person that takes hundreds at an event. Get rid of the duplicates. You don't need 20 shots of the same group of people. Find the best one and get rid of the rest. But if you could make an initial pass with your photos, Really discerning. do you need every single photo? That can really help with this whole process. When you go to sort them and organize them.
Now if you have young kids. separating those duplicates out and setting them aside can be really helpful for projects. And then you don't mind if they get cut up or, pasted on things. And, sad occasion. many people will use them for boards at wakes and funerals. again, being able to put some of those duplicates on there, you don't worry about them getting ruined. If you are putting photos that you want to keep on those types of boards, be really careful of the adhesive that you use you don't want to ruin your pictures.
And, I really do recommend trying to make this a regular practice so that you can get through them. Maybe spend, 15 minutes a day looking through some photos and what you would do is from your collection box, you would move any photos that you're keeping to a keep box. Get rid of any photos that you're not keeping and then maybe set aside duplicates. that you may want to give to, or have for your children, or if you, maybe you want to give them to somebody else, make sure you ask them first. Or if you do give them to them, give them permission to get rid of them, because I know a lot of people will feel guilty if they received photos and then they're like, I don't have a place for these. I don't know what I want to do with them. Let them enjoy them and then let them, let them go.
Just getting the sheer number of the pictures under control is really helpful. And, as far as how you're going to organize them, you can put them in albums, you can put them in scrapbooks, you can put them in photo safe boxes. I think the most important thing here though, is making sure that you make a note on each picture. Who's in the picture. When it was, you may only know the decade, but that's okay too. Where it was. So think of who, what, where, when and how, and maybe any thoughts that you have about it. And always write on the photo with a photo safe pencil on the back. You don't want to use anything that's going to harm the photo. So that's for physical photos.
For digital photos. This can be a lot more tricky. Moving files deleting files, worrying about duplicates. Things that can help you though using a Mac, you can do clean my Mac and find any duplicates because you may have four or five of the same file that can happen a lot. Sometimes we don't realize we've backed it up and then we've backed it up again. And this is for you business people, too. If you're famous for creating multiple copies of things, you'll know this, you might have photos everywhere. If you're creating social media or you're working on your website, or are you doing a blog? Anything like that? your photos may be all over the place. Really for your computer, you want to chip away. Definitely chip away and you want to delete as much as you possibly can.
When we're thinking about organizing digital photos. This is really important because it's even more difficult to get the who, what, when, where, and how onto a photo. But. You could use a naming convention. you could decide how you want to describe photos and you could put. some of the details in the name. And there are softwares to organize. I don't personally use any because Creative Memories, had a software, and I used to use that. And then when they stopped releasing it and I had a computer crash. I lost everything. I didn't lose the photos, but I lost all the organization. And that was really disheartening. So for me, I'm very much just,folders on my computer. or at least when I had the PC, I had folders on the computer. Now with a Mac, things are a little bit more easy to search and look for. but one thing I will say is. a lot of people will just dump their phone right onto their computer without even thinking twice about it. So now you've got all these photos on your phone. you've got a, maybe in Google drive or you have them on your Mac or on your PC. That can be super overwhelming if you're not cleaning up the photos before you're doing it. Making a regular practice of cleaning your phone before you even import can really help. some people don't want to do that. They want to do the delete on. the computer and that's fine too, because. If you're not keeping him in both places, it really doesn't matter. But, I just wanted to give you some general tips today just to get started. Get started with decluttering, always. and. do a little bit each day.
Just chip away and, again, get rid of the blurry ones, get rid of the the duplicates, you don't need 20 pictures of the same event with all the same people in each one. and one thing you can think about going forward too, is if this does become overwhelming and you're thinking, oh, this is a lot to delete. Next time you're at an event really think about the pictures that you're taking. Maybe you take less posed pictures and you take more candid pictures
That will really help in not, having a bunch of duplicates because you're just capturing the essence and, it's a lot easier to figure out which ones are good when you do that. So go in with a plan when you're taking pictures. I say, I want to make sure you get a picture of everybody. How do I want to do this? Do I want to just take one big picture of the whole group? Or do I want to capture the essence? I really love candids much more than posed photos. but I get posed photos. It's nice. It's nice to have.
Two things I want to leave you with.
It isn't necessary to scan every physical photo that you have. You may want to scan the most important ones, especially if they're old and they're starting to crumble because having capturing it now before the photo is destroyed. Is, timing is everything. And actually those photos can be digitally, digitally restored. but have a backup. For all your digital photos, whether you use an external hard drive or you use some sort of an online service, you don't want to just have them on your computer. Or just on your phone. That's the first thing. And then the second thing is when you're thinking about photos, Think about your family members going forward. It can be really overwhelming to inherit a ton of photos when you already have a ton of photos yourself. So leaving a smaller amount would be wonderful, but also leaving a portion of those with your words of the who, what, where when and how is such a gift? It's such a gift to your family.
I know that scrapbooking can be very overwhelming for people, whether you're doing physical scrapbooks or digital scrapbooks. like I said, taking that photo safe pencil writing on the back of each photo, not every single photo, but trying to get a gist for people and maybe, the photos that you do right on, keep those set aside so that those could be the photos that people know these were the important ones.
I talk more about this in. a program that I had created called Face Your Photos, which is now fully incorporated into my new Sensibly Organized program. So I took my membership and I divided it into two pieces. I have the content piece now, which is separate. That is no longer something that people will pay monthly for. That is a one-time purchase. And then. The membership piece is the accountability, coaching and community with me, and that is a monthly cost. So I'm almost ready to release this to the public, but If you're listening to this podcast today. September 19th between now and say, I think September 30th, that's my goal to get this re-released.
You can head to the link in the show notes. The sales page is there, I'm still refining it. I think I've caught everything. But I may not have, but you can read more about the program. You can purchase the program. And if you're, like I said, if you're listening before September 30th, 2023, You can use the coupon code and I'll put this in the show notes as well. SEP23. To save a hundred dollars. I don't have the membership piece hooked up with that yet. but the way it's going to work going forward is when people buy the program. They, when they buy. They will have the chance to get the membership 50% off. For a limited amount of time. Probably. 24 hours after purchase. So just know that if you do end up wanting the membership piece, I'm going to honor that for you as well. So if you have any questions, just reach out to me. My contact information is always in the show notes. And I'm really excited to get my membership back out. And as always, I'm wishing you much progress, peace, purpose, and the permission to be messy. Thanks for listening.
