Organize Your Pictures

I spent much of the day yesterday looking through old photos. Oh how I wish I had been more organized with my photos. When we got our first digital camera I ceased to get them printed. I saved them on my computer. Unfortunately, I’ve had 2, 3 or even 4 computers since then. I was very disorganized. I have hundreds and hundreds of pictures but they are mostly in date folders, with no descriptions. Another problem I have is that I have pictures on two different devices, in three or four different places.

Then I have a few photo albums with the kids youngest pictures in them, as well as Mike’s and my early years together. So any time I want to put a picture of when the kids were little little on my blog I have sort through the albums and then scan it in.

Unfortunately I have a gap in the pictures in the albums and the oldest pictures I can find on my devices. I sort of remember a cd I made with pictures on it, so I’ll have to go in search of it soon . . . maybe even this weekend.

I get so used to living in the here and now that I forget what it was like when the children were little. I have an accusing image in my memory of being disengaged from my children when they were young but I know that was not always the case. (I do believe that there is a healthy amount of disengaging to be had though.) Then I look at some of the pictures I have and my heart melts. It’s funny because it isn’t just those adorable years when they were 6 and under that does me in. Even when I see pictures of my boys as teens, I get nostalgic. Tiffany is still a teen, so that doesn’t hit me as hard but seeing her as a pre-teen does.

Then there are the animals. We had a wonderful smart Shetland Sheepdog. He was beautiful and sweet. He’s been gone for a while now and I get nostalgic when I see pictures of him too. He used to “sing” happy birthday with us.

Do yourself a favor, take lots of pictures of everything! It’s even good to take pictures of trees and flowers and landscapes and such. My parents gave us some Bradford Pear trees when we moved onto our property ten years ago. I was surprised to see how much those trees have grown in the past 10 years.

Another favor to do yourself would be to keep them organized in some way. And when you get a new device, have a central location to keep all the pictures. I think I’m going to have to go back through my terabyte external hard drive and move all my pictures into one folder and organize it by date and named by topic too. I will stay away from programs that help you arrange your pictures in “albums” because I did that with one of my computers because I thought it was neat. The problem is that now those pictures are misshapen and need to be adjusted, thus creating even more work for myself.