What 3 Weeks Organizing My Photos Taught Me About Downsizing
Are you downsizing? Did you struggle with some of your favorite possessions? Have you thought about downsizing your photos?
Our Downsizing Challenge
60+ years of photos were stored in 5 large plastic storage containers that needed two people to lift them. Some were in photo frames; some in photo albums and some were loosely thrown into the containers.
The challenge was to reduce 5 heavy containers down to 2 easily manageable ones.
Back in 2011, we sold our large 5-bedroom family home and moved into a small 2-bedroom apartment by the beach in the Northern Beaches of Sydney, Australia.
That turned out to be a major downsizing challenge. I’m sure that many of you have experienced that and know what that feels like. The emotions, the garage sales and the online ads took over our lives for the next few weeks.
Our nomadic life began in 2013 and, once more, we needed to downsize our possessions, which ended up filling up one of our son’s garages.
Would we ever return to live a normal life again with possessions?
In 2014, we returned for a few months and the plan was to reduce our possessions even more to 10 plastic storage containers.
We opened the garage door and instantly felt overwhelmed as we struggled with the emotions of the task at hand. We quickly closed the garage door and headed off to the nearest pub wondering what the hell we were going to do.
Six very long weeks later, we had reduced our possessions to 10 plastic storage containers, 1 suitcase and 4 paintings and a man box of “bits and pieces” that needed to be kept “just in case.” Our “storage life” then journeyed to a friend’s shed for a few months and then found a home back in our other son’s garage.
So back to our photo challenge… we thought we had a plan!
Our 5-Step Photo Downsizing Plan
Step 1: Review all photos (10,000+ estimation), and remove from the current photo albums and frames.
Step 2: Discard those of poor quality (there were many of these and we guess we kept them because we had paid for them in the many rolls of film that we took….long live digital cameras, that is all I can say!)
Step 3: Create two piles 1) photos that are to be kept 2) exceptional photos that were to be rephotographed and saved to three external hard drives – one for us and one each for our boys.
Step 4: Place photos in acid free bags in date and event order.
Step 5: Store in two plastic containers.
Sounds simple, right?
Where to Start
Do not start where we started! It will end in disaster and confusion. We (sorry, I mean “I”) opened the first box, dived into the memories and sat fixated for the next few hours pulling all the photos out of the albums in no order at all. I felt relieved that I had just saved these photos from the cheap plastic photo albums that had housed these memories for so long.
In this euphoric state of mind, I sat with hundreds of photos surrounding me until I realised that we (once again, I) needed to put them in some sort of date order.
With the empty photo albums now completely destroyed, any chance of dating our precious photos had now gone up in smoke.
We struggled to get our next four containers into date order. There were individual photos from our respective childhoods, ancestral family photos, wedding, babies and our boys sporting achievements and holiday photos.
Looking back, I should have been more diligent on writing on the back of photos the dates and events.
A task that should have taken a week turned into three weeks. Each afternoon, we had to wait for the right light to rephotograph the photos. We had to tread carefully around the piles of photographs spread out on our living room floor, most of them now dated and some even with the event shown.
One pile still sat in the corner, obviously being ignored by both of us. We just did not know what to do with them.
Over the years, friends and relatives sent us many photos of their children and important dates in their lives. We had lived abroad and we had missed many of their events. Some we thought we could recognise and some we could not – we are not big fans of “miscellaneous” files but in this case we could not avoid it.
Three weeks later our photographic memories were now stored neatly into two containers, in acid free packaging that will prolong their life, and three external hard drives of our family’s history.
Friends are now coming to us to sort their family memories out. It could be a new business for us, but the answer is no. After all, we are nomads and we are travelling the world. We are having adventures and taking more photographs!
Let’s Have a Conversation:
Could you downsize your photographic memories? Which photos are most special to you and why? How many photos do you think you have in boxes and old albums? Please join the conversation.
Tags Downsizing Your Life
All I can add, as 45 years of our family photos and those of our parents were destroyed by flooding from Hurricane Ian, is plastic bins are not waterproof! Also, if you’re storing precious items that can’t be replaced, keep them 3 feet off the ground.
I am anticipating doing the same when I finally get a house of my own after 20 years in homes on farms or cattle stations provided by my husband. Now he is gone (not dead, just gone), I am building myself a new house which he had promised but never delivered. So I am not downsizing. I just want a few years in a house with all of my belongings around me. But the photos! Oh Lord, thank you for digital cameras and portable hard drives. Even if it takes me years, I plan to scan and save a long, busy life-time of photos. This is partly for the joy of firstly going through the physical photos and re-living the event/place and then storing them electronically where I can quickly retrieve them and send to my family or friends. It might be a good idea to save some to your Ancestry.com family tree for posterity. Just a note about throwing away photo albums – I came across an entire album of family photos and they had to be at least a hundred years old. I am sure that SOMEONE in that family would have loved to have those memories, so I will send out a note to everyone in my family asking if they want the albums before I dump them within a certain time frame.
Bought a Canon scanner, scanned all photos. Discarded old paper/cardboard photo albums and put photos into small boxes. Uploaded all photos onto the cloud (Onedrive in my case) where they can be shared. They are rarely looked at but it’s reassuring that they are safe from fire, loss, theft.
What would we do without the cloud!
Years ago we scanned and digitized all of our photos. My hubs put them into a software program that is our screensaver on the computer. It randomly selects photos to display for a few seconds each. We enjoy seeing a picture taken 60 years ago followed by one from a year ago. This way we can enjoy seeing pictures every day and they aren’t stored away in a dusty box on a shelf somewhere.
This is such a great idea