Using Something I Love (How I Stay Caught Up on My Pictures, part 2)

This month on #familyhistoryfriday I’m sharing how I personally stay caught up preserving my own photos and memories.  Being behind can be not only overwhelming but paralyzing.  Last week I showed you {my photo organization system} that helps me know what I have and where it is.  That’s the first important step to preserving pictures, but an equally important step is to do it using something you love.  

What type of memory-keeping method would make you look forward to sitting down and preserving your photos?  Your chosen method should be something do-able, something in both your price range and interest.  Mostly, though, it should be addictive.  (I’m not kidding.)  It should be something that draws you back again and again.  Choosing a memory-keeping method you love is crucial to your success in staying caught up preserving your pictures.

Let's brainstorm about YOU.  Are you a hands-on person?  Are you a computer person?  Do you work best in groups or alone?  What kind of memory-keeping method would best serve you?  What would you love and do?  Think about what will be your best chance for wild success at preserving your photos regularly.

Preserving photos in a beautiful way is nice, but it’s not required.  My parents and grandparents took and preserved photos before any of the current cutesy trends.  The books and albums that they created are cherished and priceless.  Let that always be your focus.

UPDATE 2022:  Photo and Story Treasures only recommends best-quality memory-keeping at reputable companies.  See our recommendations are listed here, including two very fast options that are simple and intuitive as well as another option that is a fancy digital scrapbooking program with full creativity and flexibility. 

Let me tell you about my experiences and what changed.

I’ve always put photos in albums and written a little something to go with them.  Good memories are so good for you.  They serve you long past the actual event by making you happy all over again.  Photos have a magic to them.  You can see faces long-gone or relive a great experience.  Memory-keeping (preserving photos and memories) is {good for the heart and soul}.

When scrapbooking became a thing, I had a friend who also prioritized memory-keeping.  We had little kids the same age, so we would set aside days to get together with our totes full of paper and stickers and let our kids play while we preserved our photos.  It was a creative, social way to preserve photos and memories.  I always looked forward to it.

After several years of doing this with my friend regularly, I moved to the other side of the country.  Life got busier at the same time.  I began digital scrapbooking because it was easier and was a huge time-saver both in terms of how long a page took to create and how I could just order multiple copies without having to re-create everything (one for each of my kids).  In my new location I found other digital memory-keepers and we got together with laptops once a month.

Another cross-country move brought another change.  I do memory-keeping mostly on my own now.  What used to be memory-keeping with friends has become helping others and teaching them as they do their memory-keeping.  So memory-keeping for me has become me-time:  a quiet, cathartic, relaxing, grounding time.  I use a method I love, and I look forward to it all the time– to working on just one more page or completing a big event preserved in digital scrapbook pages.  I love sharing them with my family.  I love thumbing through them on my own.  My memory-keeping method is a creative outlet and a stress reducer for me.  It continues to be good for my heart and soul.

Next week I will show you what I do, the addicting method I love and do regularly.  In fact, you’ll get to see my actual process and what makes it so fun.  Unlike today’s show-and-tell type video, when I show you my addictive method next week, it will feel like you’re doing it with me.  You’ll see exactly why I love it and why it’s so easy for me to stay caught up preserving my photos and memories.

You don't have to love digital scrapbooking like I do, but staying caught up on your pictures is much easier if you find something YOU love.

Why is finding an addicting way to preserve your pictures and memories so crucial?  So you’ll do it and enjoy doing it!  So you’ll come back again and again.  So you can stop feeling overwhelmed and guilty.

Photos and memories have an enormous power to bring you joy.  Let them.

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This post was originally published at www.livegrowgive.org on September 15, 2017, by Jennifer Wise.  You can find more #familyhistoryfriday articles by clicking the hashtag below next to Labels.

This post originally included a video showing four different ideas for memory-keeping, two digital and two hands-on/paper.  The paper scrapbooking companies are no longer, and the two digital companies are now one under new management, having lost much of the original creativity.  When this post was updated in 2022, the memory-keeping recommendations were changed to three better options, all digital, that range from simple and intuitive to fully creative and flexible.  See the link in the update in red above.