Another fun way to spend a Saturday evening in January is to look through all the photos from the previous year. We gather them all together, either in print form or electronically and the first thing we do is get rid of the ones that are 'no good'. The 'no good' ones are either deleted or thrown away and then the others are sorted into two piles, ones we would like to keep and ones we can give away in the form of cards or another sort of photo gift.
Of course, all of this takes a LOONG time as there is much remembering of events and good natured teasing about photos that did not quite turn out as expected. After all the sorting the pictures are either stored in an album or sent off for printing so they can be stored in an album. The 'gift' pictures are stored away, ready for crafting though the year.
There is a new book out called " The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning' which is all about going through your possessions regularly so that your heirs won't have to and it has a whole chapter devoted to photographs. I think our annual look through is a good idea and a lot of fun, so it is nice to know that we're also making less work for our 'heirs' !
There is something so nice about photographs. For too long I have been storing them electronically but I am making a cd of the ones I want to print off. It occurred to me that the pleasure I get from looking through old photos of my parents and of when my children were small is denied to a future generation. So, whilst I am all for the idea of clearing out to save heirs doing it, I'm going to add to the box of things that WILL be left.
ReplyDeleteYes, when my Mum died the only things we really wanted to save were the photographs. You can get the electronic ones made into really nice photo books now too.
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