A Guide to Organizing Your Printed Photos
I recently received this question through Minima’s Instagram:
Hi Kristen! I am a huge (new) fan and follower of your work. I was wondering if you might be able to provide some insight on how to minimize/manage photos. I am a life-long minimalist, but my biggest issue is photos. My son is going off to college and as I get older, I want to make sure I not only have photos of his life, but photos of my life as well to pass along to him. I could really use some guidance on curating an album, digital or physical, so that my son knows where he comes from. Thanks for your insight.
Organizing photos can be a daunting project, even for a seasoned minimalist! In this Minima Journal, I’m going to share my best practices for organizing physical photos. Part two (coming soon) will focus on scanning and organizing digital photos.
Establish your end goal
Most of us have a LOT of photos. It can feel overwhelming to even begin a project of this scale. Whenever I work with clients to organize photos, I ask what the end goal is: do you simply want photos loosely consolidated to one location, or do you want everything digitized and organized chronologically? It may be helpful to start small. Perhaps you set an initial goal to consolidate all photos. Once that step is complete, you may feel empowered to go further.
I also advise against starting with photos in terms of overall home organization. It’s best to tackle everyday spaces first, such as the kitchen or clothing closet. Doing so will create the physical and mental space to focus on photos. I advise the same approach when organizing paperwork.
Gather all photos together
With any category, I suggest consolidating all of the items together before getting started so you can have a clear sense of your collection. A guest room or bonus room may be a great space to corral your photos, but you can also carve out a corner of a room if space is limited. Pull photos from everywhere in the home and place them in your designated area. It helps if the space has a good surface for sorting, such as a clear floor or table top.
Sort photos by year or decade
Once you’ve consolidated all photos to one space of your home, I recommend starting with a loose sort by year or even decade depending on the expanse of your collection—1980s, 1990s, 2000s, etc. Shoe boxes or gallon-sized Ziplock bags can be a great way to temporarily group photos together; be sure to label the box or bag with the year or decade it contains. Once the loose sort is complete, you can go to the next level of detail by sorting decades into years or years into months.
If you have a mix of albums, photos boxes, and other assorted loose photos, I recommend taking all the photos out of the albums and boxes and including them in your sort, especially if your end goal is to scan everything.
Identify photos to keep versus discard
Once you’ve sorted chronologically, it will be easier to identify and discard duplicates. I also recommend minimizing any photos that are blurry or over/underexposed. Let go of photos with people you don’t know or remember, or of occasions you don’t feel need to be documented. If a photo brings back a bad memory, let it go. Storing and scanning photos can be costly, so only keep those that matter to you or your family. Most importantly—don’t stress. Photos can be a nice record of our lives, but living in the present moment is more important than clinging to the past.
I’ll be sharing a Minima Journal with part two of this series soon: scanning and organizing digital photos. Stay tuned!