Monday, April 14, 2008

Clutter bust: Photo albums

This week I'm going to do different "Clutter busts" devoted to attacking little areas of the house that accumulate clutter but you may not even realize it! Today we are going to attack PHOTO ALBUMS!!!

You can ask any one of my friends or family members, I LOVE pictures. I always carry my digital camera with me in case I need to catch a shot; it is a little extension of myself. Problem is that I've acquired SO many pictures over the years that it's time to go through them and pick the very best ones. Much like a collection of items, pictures should have the same approach: keep the VERY best ones, toss the rest.

What's a TOSS picture and what's a KEEP?

**TOSS**
  • any unflattering picture. really, why would you keep a picture that looks like you have 2 chins when you only have one?
  • duplicates. how many shots do you need of a kid blowing out birthday candles? keep the cutest ones, dump the rest
  • pictures that you can skim over. if you show your photo albums to your friends and there are some you just flip through, get rid of them, they are just taking up space.
  • fuzzy pictures. if you can't tell who is whom, why are you holding onto it? if you have to squint to enjoy the picture, just let it go.

**KEEP**

  • pictures that make you smile. 'nuff said.

I have different albums for different items so that I can find pictures easily. I have one album strictly devoted to my beautiful godsons and all of our wonderful times in England with them. Another few albums are devoted to my travels around the world. I keep an album that has pictures of the pets that I've had throughout my life. I keep an album of my high school and college days. I keep an album of previous Christmases that I went home and visited my family when I lived in England. And I have an album of my life in England, traveling around the country, visiting London, spending times with friends, etc. By organizing your photos into albums devoted to different aspects of your life allows you to access a photo easily without sweating over giant stacks of photo albums. Organizing is about making your life EASIER and this is one way to do that.

I started this little project on Saturday night and I'm still working on it! I have a HUGE stack of photos that I'm giving to my ex (our travels, high school days, life together, etc.) so that he may enjoy them and I also threw away so many pics, whew! I'm in the process of getting them reorganized into photo albums, I'm hoping by the end I can purge a few albums and have a few empty ones for future use!

I'll let you know when I'm finally done! This is a great way for me to really evaluate the most important (documented) moments of my life and making sure I only keep the really good photos!

I hope you enjoy this little segment, please leave comments and/or suggestions if you know one area of the house that tends to get neglected!

Tomorrow's Clutter bust: Kitchen pantry. :)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

oooohhhhh, pick me, pick me, I have one!!! What about the filing cabinet? I know I store every single piece of paper in mine and I have to go through that alot because if I don't, It just gets over stuffed. That may be a good one to talk about. Shredding old documents and stuff!! Man, just talking about it makes me want to clean mine out! Love ya and proud to know that you made an album just for the boys!