The first thing you’ll want to do is create a timeline of family events such as weddings, birth dates, vacations, and important milestones. Each event will be a new category for your photos.

Start with your printed collection. Sort through your photos and beginning making piles based on categories you determined, and add subcategories as needed. As you’re placing photos on your family timeline, mark each one according to its level of importance. Photo organizers use a simple acronym called “The ABC’s”:

• A’s are your most important photos. These are photos you definitely want to keep and may want to store in an album or frame and display in your home.

• B’s are photos that are important but don’t necessarily belong in an album or on your wall.

• C’s are photos that are not important enough to keep. (Yes, you can throw photos away!) Don’t be afraid to throw away pictures that are duplicates, blurry, or otherwise less important to the story you’re trying to tell.

• S’s are “story” photos, meaning they’re important for a particular story. These should be set apart and saved for certain types of displays that are meant to tell a story, either visually or with written words. Examples include: a printed biography, your FamilyArc Storyline, or a written scrapbook.

Use index cards to note important points about the photos that will help to tell your story. Items to have on hand:

• Cotton gloves

• Face mask (for moldy photos)

• Garbage bags (for discarding unwanted photos)

• Empty bins for sorting

• Sticky notes

• Index cards

• A photo-labeling pencil

Now that your printed photos are sorted, it’s time to work on your digital collection. Digital photos can be overwhelming if you have a lot of them, and using a photo organizing software can certainly help. Make sure you perform a backup before you get started, just in case you hit the delete button too many times!

You can use the same photo marking system above for your digital collection, flagging each photo with A, B, C or S, as appropriate. Your camera automatically names each photo with a number after it’s taken, but you may want to rename them so it’s easy to find them later. Photo organizers recommend the following convention for naming your digital photos: Year-Month-Date Event Name Example: 2014-5-6 Grandma’s 50th Birthday Party This convention automatically puts your photos in date order and makes for easy identification when sharing them with friends and family.

ORGANIZE YOUR PICTURES IN STORIES, IT IS WORTH IT. FamilyArc - Home