MY Library of Memories

A year or so back I finally got a hold of Stacey Julian's book Photo Freedom. It outlines her 'Library of Memories' system which she uses for organising and storing her photos, scrapbooking her memories and storing her pages. It category based and suits the way I scrapbook so I decided to adopt most of what she does and adapt it for my process/style. I started with my photos (mostly complete) and then dived into taking all my previously made pages (about 1000 of them) out of their albums and dividing them into categories. Then I started to put the pages into chronological-ish order in their catergories- because that's the way I like it. And then something happened and I stopped and boxed it all up and stashed it all away under my scrap-table.

Until the other week.

When I got them all out and started to file them.

Then I ran out of albums. So the next day I went to 3 different spotlight stores and brought 22 more albums. And then I spent another day and a bit putting the rest away. And now I have this.

And it makes me exceptionally happy every time I look at it- which is fairly often seeing as they are right in my lounge! I still have a little way to go with some stuff. And over time I will change things like Will's albums- so he gets some with a little more personality and so I can use his current ones for expansion in the other categories. But in the meantime it feels pretty good to have them all there are able to be viewed... because really that's the whole point isn't it?

Stacy has a whole system from photo storage and curating to album categories. Here's what I am doing...

Photo Storage: All my photos to be scrapped (or not scrapped) are in slip in albums- each set of photos has it's own pocket. I have added a sticky note on each of the set that I have enlargements for and they are stored elsewhere because of size constraints.

I have some sets of photos that are designated for mini albums and these are enveloped up and stored in a photobox.

I also have a photobox which is currently divided into sections for each of the members of our family- I'll add some more as I develop a need for them. As I work my way through my albums I come across photos that I know I'm no longer interested in scrapping or I decide not to scrap all the photos in a set- these photos will get filed into this box for 'other pages' Eg if I decide I want to do a page about the special songs we've sung to each of our kids to settle them when they were babies I can go to this box and pull a photo of each kid from their section that I want to use on the page.

And I have a drawer with all my enlargements in chronological album. 

Stacey has a category that she calls Cold Storage- essentially the photos you think you'll never scrap- I don't normally have any photos like that and if I do I generally pass them on to Will or Merenia to use as they please.

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My albums are titled:

• All About Me (Individual albums for each of the six members of our family)
• All About Us (These are for the pages that show relationships between the members of our family)
• Things We Do (Sports, Scrapping, Gliding, Theme dinners and stuff we do that isn't place specific)
• People We Love (Sorted by Les' Family, My Family and Friends)
• Places We Go (Specific places that we revisit time and again, places that are special to us eg Scrapcamp, Shakespeare Bay, Starbucks, and places that we might visit on holiday)

I also have albums for the Cats, Christmas LO's, each kid's school life, my Gifted and Talented Class, and also some themed albums like Les' Deployment to the Gulf and our big South Island Holiday).

I haven't grouped the layouts in the album (ie all the scrapcamp LO's together) I have placed them in rough chronological order. I like the fact I can flick through the album and see a different thing with each spread- as opposed to having to look at 6 years of Netball LO's all in a row. And I also like to see the progression of time in my albums.

I love using the ring bound albums- originally when they first came out I wasn't so keen to have a big gap between the pages especially in a double page spread- but to be honest I just don't see it when I look through the albums and I love the flexibility of being able to slip a page in where it belongs chronologically. I don't think the pages are as stable in the album as they are in a post bound album and therefore maybe not as kid friendly but I am happy to put up with that. I also love these American Craft albums as they have the 'no snag' binder rings.

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One of the things I really like about this system is that it lets me see the holes- the places I haven't told as much or as many of the stories as I would like to. For example I don't have a whole heap of pages about Les and Tama full stop- and I don't have many LO's about some of the important places we loved in Auckland or about the different relationships that each of the kids have with each other. 

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In terms of actually scrapping a full page LO-  I simply pull out a slip in album and flick through till I find some photos that I want to scrap then I pull them out and scrap them. I am also incorporating more divided page protectors into my albums- more on that in another post.

♥