Sunday 29 May 2011

Photo Freedom by Stacey Julian

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I first read this book about 3 years ago, and immediately knew this was the system that would work for me!  I had 3 decades of old ‘sticky’ photo albums, the photos quite nicely presented, but very little journaling!  Right from when I started scrapbooking I knew I wanted to go back and redo these albums.   I especially love Stacey’s Library of Memories, and have set this up for myself for the older photos.

pile of photos22nd aug 026 - Copy22nd aug 025 - Copy

This year, Stacey has tweaked her Library of Memories class and changed it’s name to Finding Photo Freedom.  I think she will concentrate more on keeping tabs on those thousands of digital photos we take nowadays!  My Nikon has recently taken it’s 10,000th photo!  I am in the happy state of having most of my old film photos well sorted. They are either in storage binders or my category box (a 12 x 12 Creative Memories power sorter).

Parham 8th July 003dog 004garden june17 014 copyfor web

So my pre class preparation has been to spend time with my digital photos!  I use Windows Live Photo gallery to organise my photos.  This enables me to tag and rate my photos.  The vast majority have been tagged correctly, but I have not rated very many.  So I have been going through them, by tag at first, and deleting the rubbish, and giving 1 star to any decent photos.  My thoughts were then to go through these and give the best 2 stars, then 3 stars and so on.  But I might skip straight to 5 stars, we’ll see!

Regarding albums, I have albums called Us, People we love, Places and Things. So as I scrap the kids when they were little (which is something I have been doing lately in LOAD), they can go into 'Us'. As the albums fill up, I think I will split them into Nicholas and Lucy and then into decades.

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The other scrapbook I like to keep is a yearly album, as per Shimelle's 'Document 2010' class last year. I do 2 12 x 12 pages plus a divided page protector for each month. So I do print out photos each month for this album. I don't know if I will print any other older photos out - maybe for projects from time to time.


Other than that I have projects, such as Home, 52 walks, an album about me. These 3 are nearly finished, but have taken a very long time! My next ongoing project will be holidays. None of our holiday photos are within my LOM system, They are all in divided page protectors in 12 x 12 albums. One day () I plan to scrap a couple of pages per holiday leaving most of the photos in their divided page protectors and incorporate the diaries I have kept and memorabelia into these albums.
Other arty things such as stamping, painting, embossing etc, I find I do not do very often. I would rather be scrapbooking and memory keeping!

What I really need to do is seriously pare down on my stash, and be ruthless. It is so hard though isn't it? I might need that 1" square bit of paper - it might be just the thing to embellish my current page! Yesterday I put all my scraps back into their drawers. It doesn't seem so bad when they are out of sight.  I feel like I might be nearly ready to give up stamping too!  Maybe just keep a few little stamps for scrapbooking, I so rarely use all my stamps now.

7 comments:

Jane said...

you sound very organised, I should stop thinking about it and start getting some order too, thanks for sharing what you do.

Gem's Crafts said...

Wow you certainly have been busy sorting out your photos - mine are completely disorganised, with some on a laptop, some on a pc, and some on a portable hardrive! Good luck with all your projects :)

Alison said...

You DO sound very organised Linda...I need to do a bit of reorganising, myself!
Alison xx

Sue Althouse said...

Wow, great organization! I have been following Stacy's LOM system and can't wait for class to start this week. Love being able to take it for free as an alum!

Shari said...

Linda - I really enjoyed reading your blog post. Sounds like you have got a good plan and are well on the way with being organised. I am definitely interested to try out the 3-ring albums.

alexa said...

Oh my goodness, you are a model of organisation! I really must get to grips with tagging photos...

scrappysue said...

Linda, it was great to see your system and have it explained so well. I really love the idea of using the divided page protectors and going back later to add in some pages and memorabilia.