Organizing Photos into a Photo Album

I completed my first Photo Album as well as organized my entire photo collection ... from 2011.

Alright, I realize it's mid-2014 here but I made a dent in the 14,000 photos taking up precious space on my hard drive, so I feel like I should be wearing a tiara or that crown from Burger King. Tackling these photos was a monster -- iPhoto is just another basement where I throw stuff I don't want to deal with.

What inspired this project was a Pin on Organizing Photos. You can read her post (which is awesome and in great detail, but she talks about printing photos which I gave up on), or you can read my version (the lazy blogger version). Take your pick.

How to:

iPhoto sorted by Month/Year

1. Sort Photos: All of my photos were in iPhoto already sorted by month/year. If yours aren't, do that first. (Also don't forget to grab your husbands phone and get his photos into your library).

 2. Cull Photos: This is the hard part, and took me a long time. I basically went through each month 3-4 different times at different time periods and deleted photos. For instance: August 2011 started with 275 photos, after 4 different deleting sessions over a few weeks/months, I got it down to 128. Some months I got down to 50, but that's like March when nothing happens.

I kept my progress detailed in my spiral notebook of which months I did, where I left off, etc so I could pick up at any time.

If you have time ... you can also crop and fix all your photos. I meant to do this but time just escaped. I agree that any photo I did crop looked better. Oh well. I'm not Ansel Adams.

How long did this take? I started deleting photos in December 2013 and finished March 2014.

3. Start Photo Book: There's a few to choose from. I made mine through Shutterfly choosing the softcover, Year in Review model. Now if I thought deleting photos took a long time, making the book took even longer. It's online and ended up being 94 pages so it crashed a lot on me and was also slow to load. Then creating the pages themselves just took a lot of time, effort, and brain power -- which I was working mostly after 9PM and my brain officially shuts down at 5PM.



This I also kept detailed in the spiral notebook, listing which months were made vs which months were now finalized.

I started the book in March and finished June 1st. The book arrived today: June 11th.

Notice the 1st page where I left the stock wording ...


4. Back-up photos: Once the book was sent off to the publisher, I resized all the photos (some were like 3MB) and then put them all both on a DVD and on my external back-up drive. And they came off my computer.

Some notes on making a Photo Book:

1. Online the photos look smaller: Seeing the pages now, I wish I hadn't done some of the 2-photo pages or the larger photos. The small sized photos looked like postage stamps online but they ended up being perfect size to capture a series of photos from a vacation, or holiday.

Like did I really need this ginormous photo of my cat?


2. I like the pre-done pages: This party page was a pre-set idea page you can choose and I like how that turned out. It's hard to have the time to stylize 94 individual pages.


Here's another one -- vacation.


3. It's expensive: Look for coupons and deals. If you don't need it right away, sit on your finsihed book until a deal comes. Mine was ready around Father's Day so there was free shipping and discounts. Even then, the 94 pages came to over $60. But I figures, printing each photo and buying books would be around the same thing.

4. I wish the spine wasn't blank: This will end up on my bookshelf so I wish the spine had the title from the front.

Final Verdict: I like the book a lot but I like trying other things so for 2012, I'm trying MyPublisher. So far it's not as "cutesy" as the Year in Review pages and doesn't have pre-done pages with their "bling" but I'm okay with that. I can compare them when I get this done ... next year.

The Money Pit strikes again

This winter we celebrated 9 years of living in The Money Pit. My husband and I can't believe we've lasted this long: this house is one big headache. But something called "excellent schools" and "terrible resale value" is making us stay put and the house is very happy eating away at our savings account one check at a time.

This week I wrote out a check for a new, professionally installed window well cover.

This window well used to hide under a splintering, decrepit wood porch that we finally took down 2 years ago to make way for a patio and now it's exposed for our kids to jump on. So we put a cover on it. Done.

before

Two years and many rain storms, heat waves, and -20 degree days later, we finally had a nice day with the kids playing in the backyard. Nice, until Caligula my daughter took one look at it and decided to pretend it was a bounce house ... and fell right through --- 3-1/2 feet down into the well!

With Cerberus, her Trio of Bears on guard

Luckily the bottom was soft-- or at least that's what my husband said from inside. He saw the whole thing happen and dove in to rescue her -- right after throwing his glass of beer up in the air.  We were so lucky the cracked piece didn't cut her ... I'm still in shock over the whole thing.

Anyway, after kindly refusing my dad's offer of covering it with a sheet of plywood which he would gladly bring over from his collection of "bits & fragments of the last 50 years" stashed in his garage, we were on the phone with a window well company and had it promptly installed.  Voila.

After

 The warranty says "lifetime" and the weight max is 250lb.  We'll see.