When I first started getting serious about memory keeping through photography (pre-scrapbooking for me), I saw how easy it was to be overwhelmed with the sheer quantity of digital photos. Yet, I trudged on for years, saving every single image on CDs, Zip disks (remember those?) and DVDs.
Then I figured out something important – my photos were becoming the same clutter that I had tried so hard to minimize in my home. My digital life was becoming as messy as my real one.
I decided to take charge of my images and started with one simple step. Coincidentally, this is the same step many of us take when trying to reduce clutter in our homes – we say no to bringing in excess stuff. With digital photos this meant immediately deleting extraneous or poor images before they begin to pile up.
With aggressive paring down upon each import, I am able to prevent my photo library from being unmanageable. I no longer have to make hard choices later, when volume can lead to indecision. I had let go of the guilt of thinking I might need a photo someday and chosen to embrace the very best snapshots as symbols of my life’s story.
Do you need to delete more? If so, you might be interested in some of these previous Simple Scrapper posts on digital decluttering.
This is a guest post from team member Ronnie Crowley.
When I first started to scrapbook I was taught that I needed to always include who, what, where and when in my layouts. I would make sure I had this somewhere on the page and rarely would I include much more. There certainly weren’t any feelings.
10 years later many of my scrapbook heroes are actively encouraging us to go beyond this type of event scrapbooking and more towards telling the story. We’re pushed to include details beyond what is obvious from the picture and illustrate more what they remind us about.
For example, this photo is of my sister and I. I’m guessing it could be a first day of school picture. I don’t have a clue at all if that’s correct and there isn’t anyone left to ask who would know. I could scrap it with a generic layout about going back to school. I can guess the year cause of the school uniforms and the house we’re at. The problem is though that I don’t know much more.
The better story for this picture really has nothing to do with the girls on the door step and more to do with the cross on the wall. Looking at this picture from my past reminded me of something totally different than first-days-of-schools, it reminded me what it meant to our household to have that cross on the wall. This is the first house we lived in which wasn’t associated with a church.
When we lived in a Rectory or a Vicarage we would get regular visitors asking for a drink and something to eat. People knew that as the minister’s family we would always give them something. I’m sure that it was this cross, that my Dad put up on our new house, which meant we still got visitors asking for assistance. My Mum would never give money but there was always a hot cup of tea and a slice of bread and cheese. So when I scrapbook picture I will look beyond the two young girls ready for school and dig deeper to tell the story of a cross and what it meant in my life.
Discovering the Other Story
I urge you to dig deeper and a find a different story for your pictures. To find this alternate story I suggest you take the picture and start journaling on a piece of paper. Set a timer and try to write for 10 minutes about the picture. It doesn’t have to be perfect English and you can even use a tree diagram or a list to get thoughts organized.
Here’s another example of how I used this method of journaling to document the bloody consequence of playing on the compost heap.
If I had just used my old approach I would have just journaled about the house in this picture but digging deeper gave me a different story. In my view, going beyond the surface provides a much more interesting story to preserve and one that has a perfect home in my all about me album.
Editor’s Note: Share a comment with the last story you told that wasn’t a literal explanation of the pictured photo.
Hello! I'm Jennifer S. Wilson, the founder and owner of Simple Scrapper. Since 2008, my passion has been finding solutions for simple, meaningful memory keeping.
