Happy birthday Maureen!

Yes I had difficulty understanding why my grandparents were not organized especially as they were avid phototakers. Holiday pictures always had a description painstakingly written on the back by my nan of what the building was. No date and often no location to help me organize them though

thanks Karen, it was a relaxing day

Quote "Lea that is great. You were obviously a born organizer!"... wish I was I'm totaly disorganized maybe some of the habbits will rub off?

theporter, you will get there, babystep by babystep. Welcome to the GON forum and good luck with becoming, if not a born organizer, at least a "getting there" organizer like many of us!

The forum has lots of good ideas to help us, and yes, a lot of it does rub off. If you try such things as "Babysteps" (breaking up chores into manageable chunks), "Pick Up and Put Away", (PUPA), and "Eliminate The Evidence", (ETE) (- like a quick cleanup of everything that you used to make a sandwich so that no one even knows you were in the kitchen!), you will be able to stop things getting worse and then you can work on decluttering.

Do write down all that you achieve (you are probably doing more than you think), and reward yourself with a break from time to time. If chaos reasserts itself at a difficult time, don't get discouraged, just get back on the GONer track and see things straighten out again.

Find the thread or threads that speak to you and jump in!

Just reporting in that I've tried to devote part of a day each week to photo organizing. I put it on my calendar or it just doesn't happen.

Here is how I tackled it so far:

Put the existing albums in order from oldest to newest
Set aside any boxes of photos without dates or not in order
Began with the non-dated photos. I felt I had to have some idea of what was in there.

Using a file crate, I made a hanging file folder for each family member.

Then I removed photos from albums, one album at a time. I made sure to copy any photo information onto the back of the photo.

Photos of scenery, people we don't know that aren't family members and vacation photos of animals at the zoo and the like were discarded by mutual agreement among family members.

If a photo was something really special and endearing OR was important family history like a rare photo of great-grandparents, then it was scanned. The scanned photos will be provided to all family members via CD.

The other photos were then divided into the file folders and went to the person most prominent in the photo. For family shots of groups or gatherings, they went into a group photo and will be divided among all of us at the end.

After photos were scanned, they were run through Photoshop software to restore them as many are fading away. Then the computer photos were renamed. (When scanned, they are automatically named scan1, scan2 etc. So photos were renamed using the date and names on the back of the photo- or by my best guess if not available.

I've completed about 20 albums, 3 shoeboxes full and a bunch of loose stuff. About 6 more albums to go. I'm working from recent to past, which turned out to be good because the older the photo, the harder it is to get it out of the album and it takes much more work to Photoshop it and identify it so I would have felt really frustrated to start with the old ones.

End the end, everyone will receive the photos in their folder plus a CD of family history photos and just fun to share photos. Plus, they will get a sampling from the folders that contain group shots and the zillion shots of the grandparents (65 years of marriage is a lot of photos- and a lot of marriage!)

Lea, you are doing a fabulous job of organizing your photos. I'm quite envious! I intended to tackle a box full the other evening and I sat down with them planning that at least I would make sure that they were in categories, but that only helped a wee bit, and I put them back in the box, overwhelmed.

What I really need to do at 70 yrs of age is cut all of them down, loose and in albums, to what I really need or want to keep, as I know that eventually they will end up for DS to deal with, and he already has thousands of digital photos plus some hard photos of his own! DH and I are only children, and no one really to divide photos with. I've already copied some for cousins.

But the problem is all in the mind - what do I want to keep and what am I willing to let go of. Considering how rarely we look at the many albums we have, much of what is in them alone, could be reduced to a few best shots from travels.

I do like your system of devoting time to this task once a week. That is the only way I am going to get on top of it all. I already have loads of digital photos, too!

I forgot to mention, I have a few boxes of slides, too!

Oh, we have slides too but they are at my brothers house in another state. One thing at a time- a good motto don't you think?

You are right, Lea. My slides can wait, too.