I have written about photos many times over the years.
If you remember I once had a huge mess. Negatives, prints, digital, behind in our albums. We set up tables in the kitchen and worked our way through all of it. Big job.
We keep a set of albums for each kid and one for the house. This is now a lot of albums. Probably 5 for each kid and more for the house. So we are talking about 25+ albums.
I have no regrets in keeping an album for each kid. I think that was the right thing to do. Our kids value those albums hugely.
I think the concept of scrapbooks gets many women buried. It is expensive, it tends to never get done. I think it is a negative thing.
I think albums where the pictures simply slip in the pocket are smart. I think a three binder approach is good. Can add or rearrange pages easily. I think it is smart to have full page pockets/page protectors and put big pictures, certificates, etc in there too.
We have an enormous amount of genealogy stuff at our house now.
The genealogy pictures are on, under, around our old kitchen table in my husband's office. So as we have been going through closets and drawers and run across a picture, that is where we put it.
The contemporary albums are in the studio. So as we find contemporary pictures, that is where we put them.
We have never thrown out a negative. They are in sleeves in a binder. We still have prints made from negatives for some photos.
My husband and I cleaned out the living room, big time, a few weeks ago.
One of the clean outs was three shelves of framed photos above the piano. Lots of small frames. Some tiny frames. Probably 50-75 frames. Not likely to get dusted regularly.
We were just going to put framed art on those shelves, but nothing looked right. And everyone wanted family photos back up there.
So we decided to put large frames with family photos on those shelves. Maybe 15 frames that can easily be dusted. We are doing all black frames, some with white matting, so it has a uniform look.
So last night we started looking through albums, deciding on pictures, and looking for original negatives, to have prints made for those frames.
My husband is very good at looking at negatives. He uses the light box. He has found several of the ones we need. A larger print is better quality made from a negatives. The ones where we cannot find a negative, we can have prints made from the pictures in the album. But these will need to be smaller prints. Same size retains quality. Enlarging from prints does not work well.
Big job.
We have run across prints I had made but never got in albums when I lost my album page supplier. I have pages now. So I have been sticking them in albums as we go.
I have never thrown away a picture. Remember the days when you shot a roll of film and every picture was printed? Our photo store did free second set. So we have two of every picture. That is a lot of pictures. I have all of them. I put the "rejects" in a basket with a lid. Those have been very useful over the years. That is where the kids dug for pictures for school projects and bulliten boards, etc. Those pictures can be cut up, glued, given away. We are going through that basket too.
I have digital pictures on the computer that I need to have printed too. Some for the black frames. Some for the albums. But we have no computer. The computer guy is moving old stuff on new computer this week.
My goal is to get to the photography store today with at least our prints order for the ones being made from prints or negatives (for the black frames above the piano).
We bought the frames so we know what size we need for prints. We have maybe 8 frames so far.
We found a few larger pictures bought on tours (like standing in front of a boat) that we need 6x8 black frames.
So it is an involved process. It is complicated.
We used to keep albums on the ledge on the landing of the stairs. That ledge has accumulated a lot of weird stuff. Going through it too.
I am working with intention of finishing, this week, not dragging out indefinitely. It is one of those things where if you walk away, you don't know where you are, what you did. So it is better to just push through and do it.
