Photo Sorting

I love going on vacations. I love taking pictures as does my husband and my middle child which is how I now find myself sorting through 3,000+ photos from our 10 day vacation in California. It's nice to have so many pictures to choose from but it's a huge task to narrow them down. We had taken the laptop on vacation with us and before leaving the beautiful state of California, my husband had downloaded the photos for our daughter's camera. Our son came also but he isn't a big picture taker, maybe because he knew we were doing plenty of it between 2 cell phones, 2 point and shoot cameras, and one DSLR.

Now that I have all the photos in place, and have chosen which photo printing place I'm using...Amazon Prime Photos (with free shipping it costs the same as free photos from Shutterfly and paying for shipping and I don't have to wait for a deal)...and it's time to pick which ones to upload. I completed the last scrapbook album I was working on and with a crop coming up in July, I need to gather up the items for my next crop project: Vacation 2017.

My first step was making a folder, Upload CA pics to Amazon, and copying pretty much every single photo into it this way we still have all the originals. I plan on deleting this folder and the contents once the pictures are upload to Amazon.  I was able to delete about 200 from the start as they were blurry or off nothing but it still leaves quite a number to sort through. Some of the photos, golf outings, I'm leaving for my husband to go through because what I think is just a rock might be something important from him and our son's golfing trip to Torrey Pines.

Next, I went through and deleted any doubles or composition of photo that appear to make it a double and any photos that even though not blurring just weren't good for some reason. As I had 3,000 photos to work with, I was a little more discerning on what I kept and also in trimming down some of the pictures...like our twenty photos of giraffes.

Currently, I'm down to a little over 1,600 photos to print. Still a lot but I know that number will go down once my husband narrows down the golf photos and the ones of seals at La Jolla cove. I plan on doing another "editing" pass on the photos to get it down to an even more manageable level.

First Crop of the Year

I'm so excited! Friday is my first crop of 2018. And to make me even happier, I completed the first draft of my short story a day ahead of schedule so I have an entire day to prepare for the crop. Which is good since there is a page competition for each day of the crop, and I have to gather up photos, paper, and embellishments to participate. I found it was easier for me to complete layouts at a crop when I stuck to a theme and currently I'm working on a 25th anniversary cruise album. And none of the layouts I'd make for it would fit with the daily themes: Friday-Christmas, Saturday-Winter Fun, and Sunday-Family (might be able to pull it off as the pictures are my husband and I but I'd like something that includes more of my family members).

So, now I have to try and find pictures that would work for those pages. The paper and embellishments I'm not too worried about as those have been organized, but my photos are still either in computer folders with no rhyme or reason to the folders they are in or in photo boxes throughout the house. It's the one category I didn't touch too much when I moved my craft space upstairs. I did have one large container filled with portrait pictures which I sorted by family member but I left the candid photos in their hodgepodge organizational state. It's a good thing I have a whole day to find some pictures that will work (or enough time to get some printed at Walmart using their 1-hour service).