My Photos Runneth Over

Yes, I came back for a second quickie post this afternoon, just to notate that I crossed another little thing off my November To-Do list. Wham, bam, that list owns me (but keeps me in ship-shape like nothing else).

I’m one of those girls who still gets photos printed periodically, but I haven’t had a great organizational system in years because I tired of buying photo albums that I never flipped through. (I print via Snapfish, and have for a full decade, pre-HP, pre-Yahoo acquisitions. Second only to zappos.com, I’ve had the best customer service experiences ever, and I’d recommend Snapfish to anyone… and if you want a referral it’ll get me free prints… HI, contact me.)

The photos on my guest room shelf were beyond sloppy; they were cascading, had no order. And also were bent, backwards, and somehow, sticky. I also can’t explain how pictures of my friend’s baby and Christmas 1996 got mixed in with photos from our recent trip to Mexico, it’s like little gnomes sneak up the stairs and shuffle them together at night

I waited until I JoAnn’s launched another one of their 50% sales that knock the price of photo boxes from $3.99/box to $1.99/box. Because I had an additional 20% off coupon that applied against sale prices, my cost-per was reduced to $1.60, and I brought home a set of four for a sweet $6.50 instead of $16.00. Extreme.

I end up making picture-sorting an all-day process, somehow getting caught up in each photo, reminiscing or questioning if I should throw a photo out because I look terrible. It also takes awhile because I handwrite simple dates, names, details on the back edge of every print in ink for obvious reasons, and I had missed doing so to some recent orders. I hope you all do that too, because it’s annoying to look through other people’s unlabeled photos, people, and someone’s bound to be looking through those boxes someday.

Not that it has tremendous bearing to you, since we all have different pictures of different things, but I broke down my stacks like this:

• Winters Family Photos (my immediate family, 1980’s-2000’s)
• 2000-2010 (Excluding immediate family, mostly accounts for high school, college, and post-college years. Photos of friends, if you will.)
• 2010-  (photos of vacations with Pete, home projects, recent events)
• No-people photos (I take a lot of object and landscape images; when it comes to wanting to frame something new it’s easier to have them in one place.)

The clean brown boxes I chose felt more studly than many of the brightly colored boxes they also had in stock; I really like the craft paper texture, and like even more that the inside of each box is a sleek black. A white exterior was also an option, but the ones in stock all seemed to have oddly discolored yellow patches, so I aborted that plan.

Once I broke down my four categories, I chopped apart a few paint chips and used them as labels to add pops of color to the neutral brown. Almost all four fit on the top shelf of the pink cabinet in the office, out of the way until I find a permanent home for them.

With one more thing organized, I’m feeling ready to bear down on holiday cooking.

Anyone else doing last minute organizing to pretend your house is orderly before family shows up for Thanksgiving?