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Organizing your photos is often the last thing on the list of things to organize, but it can be one of the most rewarding because once it’s done, it’s done and can be enjoyed for years to come. Plus, nothing beats being able to easily and quickly put your hands on *that very specific photo that’s suddenly needed for that very important upcoming event*.

Let’s face it, we all have physical photos lying around. The question is what to do with them.

Here’s how I tackled my photos.

Gather all photos to one Location
Determine how you want to sort them
Store photos in individual cases separated by category

For my recent photos (a much smaller undertaking than the mounds of pictures from my childhood), I sorted everything by category/event along with the date range. There weren’t too many photos, so I chose a smaller 6-case storage box for this project.

For my family’s childhood photos, it was a different story and a much larger undertaking. There were too many pictures to determine the dates and events of every photo, so I began by sorting photos based on the people pictured.

Then every sibling got a large case of their own with small cases subcategorized by generic age range. This makes it easy to find certain photos like “a baby picture of Emily” when needed for an event like “her high school graduation”. The separate storage cases for each sibling also make it easy to pass down the photos in the future to each respective person.

For photos that included multiple people, I sorted them out by the specific combinations of people pictured to again make it easy to find certain photos when needed. If there was a large amount of photos from one specific family vacation, those remained grouped together and received their own individual case.