Yesterday, the second day of spring, we received a lot of snow.  I wouldn’t mind all the snow if it was January or February, but the calendar says it is spring!!  I told the kids months ago that the Easter Bunny will come when all the snow melts, but I don’t think those 6 foot snow banks are going to melt in time!

Elements from “Billet Doux” by One Little Bird Designs and “Petit Leon” by Micheline Martin.

All this talk about spring had me thinking about spring cleaning and, more importantly, spring organizing.  Along with organizing things in the house, we shouldn’t forget about organizing our photos.  There are many ideas on Pinterest for managing digital and printed photos and the key is to find a process that works for you and do it consistently.

I took about sixty photos of my kids out in the snow yesterday and sat down last night to upload photos from the last week.  In my method of organizing digital photos, I try to upload photos from all cameras into Photoshop Elements once a week.  I delete the really bad, blurry photos right away, then look at all the photos to find my favorites.   I have a folder within Photoshop labeled “Family 2013 Album” that I will put all the favorites in.  The amount of editing I do to the photos depends on my mood and time.  The photos outside with all the snow just required a quick “Auto Levels” correction and then added to the family  album folder.  At the end of the month I will have a look at that folder and decide what photos I want to include in our yearly photobook.  For the month of March I have 20 photos that are favorites and I will probably only use twelve of them depending on how they work with the photobook template I created.  So I started with about 150 photos for the month and will use 10-15 of the very best to represent our life for March 2013.

If you are looking at organizing your photos for a family, baby, or vacation album keep in mind that you don’t have to use every photo, just the best ones.  Also, you don’t always have to organize photos chronologically.  Sometimes it is easier to group them according to event or subject like Christmas, friends, birthdays, road trips, school, etc.  It is also important to think about the end product for the photos: will they remain forever on the computer, be printed and put in an album, shared online, or shown off in a beautiful photobook.

I encourage you to take the time now to go through your photos for the first quarter of 2013 because you won’t want to do this when spring really arrives!

Leah