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.