If you’re like me you have shoe boxes full of unorganized, unlabeled photos still in the original envelope that they were picked up in from the store or developer.  It can be a little daunting to decide how to get your arms around organizing this over whelming task. So, where do you begin? First, do you want to place them in photo sleeves and store in a binder album or in an organizer until you are ready to implement a scrapbooking project? Once you make this decision you can follow some recommendations to sort and create a system of photo (or negative, or cd or e-file) organization:

 Chronologically

This is the simplest and works well if you have a huge box of photos. Start by sorting your pictures into piles by year. If the photos in each pile remains high, consider subcategories of seasons or months.

 Event or Theme

If you have the tendency to take a lot of pictures for one event, it will be easy to sort your photos by event in the envelopes that come from the developer. This works well for vacations or school years. Write the date and activity on the outside of the envelope so you can identify them easily when you are ready to start scrabooking.  Then store them chronologically, alphabetically, or by subject. 

 Person or Group

You can also sort photos by people or groups of people, depending on the style of scrapbooking  project.  For example, you may want to sort your photos by school or extra curricular activities (lessons, sports etc), church groups, teams, leagues etc., or you may have duplicates produced for your children’s own scrapbooks or for their grandparents. Another example, if you have an album or a section in an album for each of your family members (pets, children etc.), when you get a layout idea about something specific you’ll know exactly where they are! 

Portraits

Individual and family portraits are easier to locate because of their size.  You may want to sort these either chronologically or by family member..