Organizing your Photos by Theme

When I ask people why they take photos, most of the time they tell me to remember and to document the important events in their life.  Our photos allow us to re-live our memories and the experiences we shared with our loved ones.   Memories are a wonderful thing....they give us that sense of belonging and significance.  Photography and photo books have given us a unique opportunity.  Our photos tell the world that we were here, and in a photo book we have the chance to tell our stories alongside of those photos.

Over the years though, we've accumulated a lot of photos, and a lifetime of photos can really be overwhelming to sort through.  We talked about the ABC's of Photo Organizing™ in my last blog; now we're going to talk about using themes to help the organization process along as well.

Let me explain what I mean.  If you're trying to create an album using your photos, you don't need every photo.  Nor do you want every photo!  Let's say you are making a graduation album.  Your child played soccer from kindergarten all the way through high school.  You have hundreds of photos.  Wouldn't it be more interesting to look at a couple pages of soccer through the years rather than twenty pages of soccer?

Likewise, if you've got a lifetime of photos, do you think you would enjoy the album more if you concentrated on the themes that were important in your life and focused on those, or if you had every photo you ever took in it?

Go back to the reason you took the photos in the first place! Think of the key themes in your life.  Perhaps your family liked to travel.  Maybe you were really into sports.  What about family traditions?  You can see where I am going with this!

My family loves to ski together.  My children have been skiing since they were 4 or 5 years old.  They learned to ski in Massachusetts, but now we tend to go to Vermont.  However, several times we've taken trips to other places, such as Mt. Tremblant, Winter Park, and Whistler.  This is something we enjoy together.  Our time together skiing has played an important part of who we are as a family.  This is a key theme for us.

What are the themes of your life that you most want to preserve?