Lesson 1: Lesson 1: Organizing Your Photographs
Whether your photographs are stored neatly in date order or scattered all over your home, organizing them for scrapbooking is still a necessary task. This lesson will prepare you to put your photos in order. Once you finish, they will be stored safely, and you will have a group of photos ready to begin your first album!
Section 1: Your Pictures, Where are they now?
The first step in beginning to scrapbook is the pictures. They are the entire reason behind creating a scrapbook--in most cases, anyway, and we'll get to that! Now, we're going to find out how organized you are in general. That's right, I'm talking to you. You have your photos scattered around the house, some in envelopes, some not, stuffed into drawers and piled on closet shelves. Don't despair! There's time and there's hope--you're reading this, aren't you?
The first thing you want to do is wrangle all your photographs into a central location. Dig them out of the drawers, out of the shoeboxes, old Christmas cards, any albums they happen to be in, and sit down with all of them. Don't forget the photos you have framed in your home! Now is the time to have these copied since pictures in frames are the first to begin to deteriorate.
The easiest thing to do is start with the most current photographs. If they're in envelopes, great! If not, put them into one with the negatives. If you don't have the envelope from the photo processing center, then find a plain envelope and put them into it. On the outside of that envelope, write the date and subject of the photographs. If you're like me, you have more than one subject per roll. That's all right. Write the highlights. For example, "May 2003, Jan and John bath time. Sally's birthday. Carnival." This way when you're looking through for a specific photo, you have some idea which envelope to look inside. If there is a photograph inside the envelope that you really like, mention that on the outside of the envelope. "Pic of Jane in pink dress."
