Album Organisation–Part 1

 

 

This is a subject I have spent a lot of time on lately. I have a number of albums now that I have been scrapbooking for several years. I participated in Stacey Julian’s Library of Memories class a few years ago, which encouraged me to get all the old photos out of non-photo friendly ‘sticky’ albums.

I read Stacey’s book ‘Finding Photo Freedom’ before I did the online LOM class.  These black 12 x 12 albums hold my holiday photos.  The red albums are my storage binders and come from Arrowfile along with the black ones.

 

My Old photos are now in ‘storage binders’ which are chronological, and categories. The LOM system was intended to get away from chronological scrapbooking, to banish guilt about not being ‘caught up’. So instead of having annual albums, there are categories: Places, Things We Do, Us and People We Love. But, I have never been sure about the LOM album system. It can be difficult to know which category a page fits in, and there is no flow to the story.

Title page to ‘Everyone Has a Story’, a real life class by Shimelle, that I was fortunate to attend.

I recently revisited Shimelle’s Cover to Cover class about album organisation. Her system is based on a chronological system, which flows along with the story. She advocates ‘upgrade albums’ for a subject which takes a disproportionate amount of pages in the annual album, eg a holiday or celebration. She also talks about Books of Me (BOM), childhood albums and ‘passion’ albums.

As you all know, photography is a passion of mine!

 

It is a very personal thing, so armed with my knowledge of LOM and Shimelle’s Cover to Cover class I set too one afternoon to decide on a system that works for me.

My recent scrapbooking style is to print out photos each month, and construct a ‘month in review’ album. Up until now I have included 12 x 12 pages in with the Project Life style divided page protectors. This year I am going to just have the divided pps, and no 12 x 12 in 2013’s album. I find it really easy to keep up with this, and don’t have many photos left over to be filed away.

Here’s a look at January 2013 pages, done with Project Life page protectors

 

But…I have a lot of photos from previous years. I took them all out of old albums when I first did LOM, which is when I sorted them into categories and storage binders. My dilemma has always been how to scrap these? As I am now scrapping the present in chronological order, I am a bit sorry I messed up the order of the older photos.

I keep my categories in a CM sorting box. 

 

I looked at my albums in progress, Us, Places, Things We Do and People and decided that the Places and Things We Do categories do not make a lot of sense to me. I now think I have come up with a system that suits me.

I like to use American Crafts D ring albums, so it is easy to rearrange and insert pages.

Come back soon and I will tell you all about my system in part 2!