Organizing photos
I take a lot of photographs, which raises the question of what to do with them all.
I take a great many photographs, and that brings the obvious problem with it.
The best ones have always gone into traditional albums with photo corners, and I have been doing that for years. The albums and everything that goes with them live in two small cabinets in the dining area: eight albums of one child so far, some from trips, and a run from before he was born.
The card boxes
The pre-digital leftovers. Good shots that never made it into an album but are too good to lose, live in two vintage index card boxes. My parents used them for business cards in the seventies, and I rescued them when the business closed.
The original label frames were broken, so I swapped in spare ones from some storage boxes.
One box is divided by age. The other, the miscellaneous one, is divided by year.
The boxes for things that fit nowhere
Some photographs resist sorting entirely. They are too random to belong to any category, and every filing system has some.
There are two boxes for exactly that, one each for the two adults in the house. Vintage snapshots and portraits that never made it into an album at the time, pictures sent by friends and relatives, and anything in a size that will not sit in the divided boxes.
It is genuinely enjoyable to go through one of those every so often, and I do not mind at all that they are unsorted. That is the point of them.
The one rule that keeps this working: do not let things that have a proper home end up in the random boxes. The moment you start using the unsorted box for things that could have been filed, it fills up, and then it stops being fun to look through and becomes another job.
The digital ones
About a year ago I decided the digital photographs needed sorting too, rather than sitting on the computer.
Two reasons. I was afraid of losing them if the machine died, which it duly did, six months later. And I wanted them kept alongside the albums, somewhere I could physically get at them.
That probably sounds odd. I am the same with magazines: given the choice I will take the printed one every time.