I continually over pack because I want to be prepared for whatever might come my way.  You need it I’ve got it.  Take a hike with me and need a bandaid, no problem, I’m your girl.  Bug spray, suntan lotion, hairspray, snack, I’ve got you covered.  I pack for weather changes, traffic delays (especially things to keep the kids occupied) and sick kids.  I’m constantly thinking ahead trying to anticipate every move.  Sometimes it can be exhausting but in my defense this OCD of mine has rescued me on more than one occasion.  However that doesn’t stop my girlfriends from mocking me about it.  You should have seen the ribbing I got for the vehicle storage video I did!   Such nice friends I have :)

However for as much as I think I might be prepared for life’s little quirks, I don’t think I’m near ready for what I might do if a natural disaster came my way.  This past week I was blessed to be able to volunteer my organizing skills to help pack up two trailers of donations for the victims who recently lost their homes to the wildfires in my province (thankfully no lives were lost).  Many people had little to no warning that they needed to evacuate and left with only the clothes on their backs.  The stories are devastating.

It’s really gotten me thinking about what I would grab if I only had 5 or 10 minutes to get out of my home (other than my family and pets of course).  What would I want to take and is it readily accessible to do so? Of course the first thing I thought of, as did many of the ladies that responded when I asked on Facebook, are my pictures.  Pictures are not replaceable and I’d be very sad to lose them.  I do have all my digital photos backed up on CD and stored in a fireproof safe however all my pictures from before I went digital are in photo albums on my shelf.  There is no way I’d have time to pack them all up to take with me.  It would take too long and they’d be too heavy.  I would have to leave them behind or do something about it now to ensure they are more portable.

I was thinking I might like to scan them all onto CD and store them as well but that could take ages to do.  So I’m considering using a photo scanning service to help me get organized in this area.  I will let you know how my experience with that goes.  Has anyone else used such a service and if so what was your experience?

I think as long as I had the safe, my laptop and wallet, we’d be okay since the safe also holds our important documentation like birth certificates, insurance papers (including video of household contents for insurance) and health cards.  All things needed to put the pieces of one’s life back together again.

Other things like the kid’s keepsakes and memory binders, I would be okay to leave behind but something like that might be more important to you.  It will be different for everyone.  It’s figuring these things out ahead of time and taking the necessary steps to protect what’s most valuable to you while you are still able to think clearly.

I think having one spot for vital paperwork is a step in the right direction.  During an emergency we simply may not have time to run around the house collecting it all. Collecting this information together in one place into a safety deposit box, home safe, binder or even file folder is a great place to start for peace of mind.

Paperwork to consider:

• birth certificates
• passports
• marriage license
• copy of driver’s license
• medical information
• description/video of household contents
• insurance papers (life and home)
• financial information including account numbers and mortgage details
• cash
• health cards
• copy of Will
• social security cards

How prepared are your pictures and paperwork?  What things can you do now to help you become more prepared?

Resources:

FREE Printable Emergency Checklist

For assistance gathering your information check out the Prepared Binder *

An alternative that provides you a way to document your home and possessions online – DocuHome *

* these aren’t products I’ve used nor are they affiliate links.  I just thought they looked helpful.

PS:  I understand many natural disasters give you no warning at all and in that case no amount of preparedness will help.  In this post I’m mainly referring to the ones that give you a teeny tiny bit of notice.

How prepared are you for an emergency? is a post from: I'm an Organizing Junkie

If you’re anything like me, you are kind of a crazy person when it comes to taking photos. I take my camera with me everywhere I go, because you just never know when that perfect photo opportunity will arise! Since I am such an avid photo-taker, I have an abundance of photos stashed on my computer (since I prefer to shoot digital). I really do enjoy looking through all of my photos, but found it to be rather annoying to have to do it on the computer. Sometimes I would be in the living room with family members and they would want to see photos – and I would have to drag them all the way up to the office. I wanted albums! I wanted to be able to just hand over a book when someone asks to see our photographs – and now I can, since I just recently organized our massive photo collection.

I know it seems overwhelming to do a complete overhaul of your photos, but with my five step process, everything will be organized in less than a week – without any stress (hopefully)!

Spend one hour a day, for five days, organizing your photos so that the whole process isn’t stressful and overwhelming. You may be able to get done sooner if you have less photographs to organize.

My Five Step Process:

Day One – PURGE
Day Two – CATEGORIES
Day Three – ORDER
Day Four – STUFF
Day Five – LABEL

PURGE: The very first thing you need to do is go through all of your photos and get rid of the ones that are blurry, too dark, too bright or of people you don’t even know. You should only keep the photos that you will enjoy looking at for years to come. Be sure to avoid keeping duplicates of the same photo, too.

CATEGORIES: How many albums do you plan to have?

For me, I have:
- 1 album for each pet.
- 1 album for family 2004-2008.
- 1 album for family 2009-2010.
- 1 album for miscellaneous (mostly my photography of objects and the outdoors).
- 1 album for my son 2008-2010.

Having categories like this works well because you can always find the photos you are looking for. Having a bunch of un-categorized albums with a bunch of photos shoved inside in no order – well, that’s just scary to think about. It creates chaos and chaos is not good!

Decide what categories you would like for your albums and then go through all of your photos and make piles. One pile for this category, one pile for that category, etc. Don’t worry about putting the photos in order by date, we’ll get to that tomorrow. Just make sure your piles are nice and neat and then put them aside until the next day.

ORDER: Now comes for my least favourite part – organizing those piles by date. Of course, you probably won’t know what the exact date was that certain photos were taken on and that is a-ok. You just need to put the photos in order the best that you can. For me, well – we moved alot, so I put my photos in the order of our homes! That way I didn’t have to remember any stinkin’ dates – I just had to remember where we lived first, second, third, etc. That worked for me!

STUFF: Since you have finished organizing those piles of photos, it’s now time to stuff those albums! Obviously, start with the earliest photos at the beginning of your album and then just start loading that baby up with all of your glorious pictures. This is the fun part, so try to enjoy it!

LABEL: This is the best part for any organizing junking like myself (hehe) – bring out that label maker! Ahhh, my beloved label maker. Make a label for each album and place it directly on the spine of the book. You can make a label for the front as well, but the spine is the most important, since that is how you will identify a particular album sitting on a shelf.

If you don’t have a label maker, you can easily make your own labels. There are lots of stores that sell blank labels and you can write on them yourself, or stick them into your printer and print some labels that way, if you hate your handwriting (like me).

…and there you have it, folks! My five step process to organizing your photos!

Be sure to put your albums somewhere in your home that you know they will be enjoyed. The living room or dining room is a great place to store photo albums. You can just pull them out and view them whenever the mood strikes. Seeing people enjoy those photos will be well worth the time you spent organizing them!

Organizing Your Digital Photos:

1. Upload photos to your computer and delete ones that you don’t like. I also delete duplicates and anything that’s blurry, too dark or too bright.

2. Date the photos and put them in the right folders. I have many folders of photos on my computer. My son (2008-2010), Events/Vacations (by date), each pet has their own folder, Family (by year), and then I also have a Photography folder and in there I have sub-folders such as food, plants, animals, landscapes, etc. Having things in seperate folders makes it easy peasy to find what you’re looking for. Try not to have too many folders or organizing your photos could become a very daunting task.

3. Back-Up photos onto DVDs every 3 months. Nothing is worse than having a hard drive crash and losing all of your precious photos! I have had this happen to me once before and I’m lucky my dad fixes computers for a living because he was somehow able to retrieve my lost photos. I still back them up every 3 months though, just in case dad can’t help me next time!

I also like to print my photos (not all of them!), so I have a folder on my computer that has photos inside that I want to print. I keep them in there until I see a sale on prints and then I order them all at once and delete them from this folder.

Once my photos are printed, I organize them into albums. I have my albums set up the same way my folders are set up on the computer to make it alot easier for me when I’m putting the prints in the books.

I find that by uploading, dating and organizing my photos at the end of the day, makes the task easy and quick.

How do you organize your photos?

Cassie is a 25 year old mom living on Ontario, Canada. She blogs over at Mrs. January about frugal living, personal finance, organizing and Canadian deals & freebies. She is married to her husband of 2 years and has an 18 month old little boy.

How to Organize Your Photos is a post from: I'm an Organizing Junkie

Problem #1

Frames that don’t stay up against the wall.  Argh, so bugs me.  I have tried all that sticky putty type stuff.  None of them ever worked for me and they often left a greasy residue mark on the wall once removed.  Gosh did I get excited when I found out that Command Brand makes Frame Stabilizer Strips, so happy!

I had no idea these existed.  Goodbye annoyance.

These suckers hold!

Problem #2

I have been a fan of the Command Picture Hanging Strips for awhile but I only thought they came in white.  They work great but on my black frames the white strips really stand out.  You wouldn’t notice it looking directly at the picture but from the side you definitely could.

Turns out the strips come in black too.  Who knew?

I have never seen them in any of the stores around me.  Command was kind enough to send me some to check out.

Before

I had a direct side view of these frames from my bed and was always annoyed that I could see the white against the black (trust me, it was more obvious than the above picture really shows…my walls are beige not white like it looks).  Those white strips were taunting me.

I’m not affiliated with Command Brand in any way, they were just kind enough to send me some product that I couldn’t get in my area.  I’m so in love with these products and no one has to pay me to say so :)

Want to win a prize package from Command Brand of your very own.  See all the details here.

Picture Hanging Solutions is a post from: I'm an Organizing Junkie

Several years ago when I was in Ontario visiting my sister we spent some time reorganizing some of her closets.  That’s when we came across the boots.  The big bad bright blue boots.  She didn’t wear them any longer but they held special memories for her from another time.  A time when she was young and carefree and living in another country as an exchange student in Denmark.  To throw away the boots felt like she was throwing away that time in her life, so they sat in her closet year after year collecting dust until I got a hold of them.

So what was the compromise?  We took a picture of those oh so lovely boots (ahem), a picture of my sister lovingly caressing them and saying goodbye.  Then together we took them to the Salvation Army and I watched as she cried huge wracking sobbing tears of sadness.  Oh okay maybe she wasn’t exactly sobbing but I swear I saw a tear leave her eye as she reluctantly handed them over.

As difficult as it was though she did part with them, that part is true.  Now she has pictures of the boots to remember that time in her life and has a lot little more space in her closet to utilize for other things.  She still misses them terribly but she says she doesn’t regret giving them away.

Way to go girl, love ya! :)

I’m linking this post to Tanna’s new weekly event called Picture My Memories.  Document your memories and pass them on to future generations instead of STUFF.

PS:  I’ve cropped the picture above as the actual picture shows my sister trying to keep her face from going to the ugly cry.  Really it was just too much so I had to crop her out :)

Picture My Memories ~ The Blue Boots is a post from: I'm an Organizing Junkie

Okay I have no idea how it is the end of March already but here we are.  I’ll be so glad to finish off with pictures this month…whew.  I know this was a tough challenge month, believe me I know, so even if you didn’t complete what you set out to do I’d still really like to encourage you to post on your progress anyway.   For this month I’m also not going to require you to include before and after pictures  because some of you I know were concentrating on organizing your pictures online and that’s not too easy to take pictures of :)  Of course you know we love the pictures so if you can that’s great, we’d love to see them!

What’s really important here behind this huge challenge is that you’ve made progress.  Big or small an accomplishment is an accomplishment.  Don’t get down on yourself for what you didn’t accomplish but be proud of what you have done.   If you haven’t finished yet make a list of what you still want to do and figure out the steps and timeline you need to take to get er done.  Hang in there, organizing pictures is a daunting task.  Don’t give up, it can be done!  Hopefully we’ll see some successful entries today that will help motivate you.

As for me and my pictures.  After a long time coming I feel as if I finally have a good system that is working well for me.  I was going to write this up as a separate post and got behind but I did want to share my system with you and so I will do it here today in SIX simple straight forward steps.  I like simple.  I like straightforward.

photo by mike (inbet_1979)

1.  Take pictures.

2.  Download pictures to computer on the same day they were taken.  I have my pictures set up (through Kodak EasyShare) to automatically download to the current year folder and then each batch of photos is categorized by date.   This is why it is especially helpful for me to download my pictures immediately.  To find a picture I need I just have to click on the year it was taken and then on the day.  Most of the pictures I take these days are around events so remembering the day I took them is fairly easy.

3.   Copy.  Within the current year folder I have a Pictures to Print folder.  After I do any required touch ups to the pictures I simply copy the ones I want to print to this specific folder.

4.  Print.  Once the Pictures to Print folder has about 100 pictures or so I upload that entire folder to Kodak Gallery and have them printed.  Most recently I have been printing them into photobooks which I like because it says me the step of having to file them into photo albums when they come back AND photobooks take up way less space than the photo albums do.

5.  Back up.  Not only do I now have my keeper pictures stored at Kodak Gallery but I also routinely back up all my photos to a thumb drive and CD for extra measure.

6.  Enjoy.

photo by Orcoo

I know there are many many ways to organize pictures and keepsakes and that is exactly what I’m hoping to see linked up here today.  Tell us what works for you, you never know who will be inspired and helped by it.

To participate please link up below to a post on your site that tells us how you did with your picture/keepsake organization this month.  Remember to use the direct link to your round-up post and not to your homepage.  That’s helpful for those of us who might not get a chance to take a peek at your post until later.  Also, as a courtesy, if you are going to participate please be kind and link back to this post within your post.

Those that link up before Friday, April 3rd at 6:00 pm PST will be eligible to win a CD copy of the Dovetail Organizer, a digital safety deposit box that provides protection and peace of mind.

The lucky winner will be selected randomly from the Mr. Linky list below.  Good luck and thanks for joining me here!

Next month should be super easy….organizing any cupboard or closet in your home.  Now that we can all do!  Further details on the monthly round-ups can be found here.

Picture/Keepsake Round-Up and my Six Simple Steps to Picture Organization is a post from: I'm an Organizing Junkie

I’ve collected some great links over the past couple of weeks related to our monthly topic of picture and keepsake organization.   I hope you find them helpful as you tackle your picture collection.

Tackle Your Keepsakes ~ @ Canadian Parents

Preserving Digitized Photographs ~ @ Unclutterer

Organizing Memorabilia ~ @ BellaOnline

6 Secrets to Digital Photo Bliss ~ @ Take Charge Solutions

Photoshop as an Organizing Tool ~ @ Online Organizing

No Guilt Photo Organization ~ @ Buttoned Up

Organizing your Photos ~ @ Suzy Q Crops

Organizing Photos ~ @ Chez Larsson

Later this week I’ll continue with this picture organization series with my step by step guide on how I organize my own pictures start to finish.

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This post sponsored by Dovetail Organizer.  Win a copy for yourself by participating in this month’s organizing round-up.  Here’s how.

Link~Tastic – The Picture/Keepsake Edition is a post from: I'm an Organizing Junkie

While I was away I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the whole picture organization thing.   Why is it such a cumbersome task for so many of us?  Through your comments and emails I realize that there are so many of us out there that struggle with this same issue.

So many pictures….too overwhelming

Too many steps…..so little time

Not urgent…I’ll get to it eventually

Too many options….much too complicated

For me and my struggle to organize pictures over the years I’ve come up against every single one of those excuses.  I always seemed to get stuck at some point in the process.  A couple of years ago it was the last one on the list for me.  I just couldn’t narrow down online where I wanted to print my pictures.   Costco is my favorite but I live 8 hours away from one of those.  So my pictures just kept piling up on my hard drive taunting me every time I logged on.  Thankfully Kodak Gallery opened up shop online in Canada last year and solved that dilemma for me.

(one of my favorite pictures)

However that didn’t solve all my problems.  I became efficient at printing my pictures but not about filing them unfortunately.   They’d come in and because it wasn’t urgent that I file them they’d get neglected and the pile would just grow and grow.   No one was tripping over them so it was an easy pile to ignore and it was always that one thing on my list that didn’t get crossed off.   Why do that to myself?  I needed to find a solution that worked with me and saved me that dreaded step.  Photobooks I’ve discovered are the perfect solution for me and the last piece of my picture pile puzzle.  You can read about my first photobook experience here.   I am happy to report that after all these years I’ve managed to eliminate every single last excuse I had and pictures are finally a joy for me once again.

For my girlfriend it meant something different.  She was tired of the expense and time of printing pictures no one ever looked at.  She eliminated that step entirely and went with a digital picture frame that now everyone in the family enjoys daily.

Which step in the process are you getting hung up?  What can you do about it?  By streamlining your process are you able to eliminate steps that you dread?   Are you making things more complicated than they need to be?  Is a compromise necessary?  Zero in on the excuses that run through your head and brainstorm solutions that will allow you to say goodbye to the unnecessary stress and guilt that steal your picture joy.

I’ve got one last pile of pictures I need to tackle from before Christmas and my discovery of photobooks.  I’m going to get it done today once and for all.

No more excuses!

Related posts:

Getting my pictures organized

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This post sponsored by Dovetail Organizer.  Win a copy for yourself by participating in this month’s organizing round-up.  Here’s how.

Love your pictures again… is a post from: I'm an Organizing Junkie

And in case you are wondering why I go to such trouble anyway, I must say we are a picture family. We love to pull out the photo albums to look through especially my two year old right now. I have them on a shelf at his level and I like that he can just pull them out whenever he wants to have a look. With my family all living in Ontario, and me being abandoned here on the other side of the country, pictures and memories are important to me. Thankfully the good thing about the digital age is that the ones that make it to the printing stage and into albums are the best of the best. No more red eye shots or heads cut off, such a treat!

Believe it or not my favorite place to get pictures printed is at Costco. They’re inexpensive and the quality is great. The only problem? The nearest Costco to me is eight hours away and they don’t ship to my house. So when I went to visit my parents in Ontario last summer I copied my MANY pictures to CD and took them with me and got them all printed while I was there. What a huge relief that was for me. Unfortunately it took me to last month to get them into the albums. Good grief!

And of course now that I’ve been home for 7 months I’ve run into the same problem again with a backlog of pictures just sitting in my computer waiting (backed up of course) for me to do something with them. When I got a promotion in my email from Kodak Gallery for 150 free pictures I jumped on it. Nothing like a free promotion to get me motivated! I love the Kodak quality but it’s always been too expensive for me to order large quantities from the States. I bit the bullet though this time because I just wanted it done and now I’m happy to report that I’m caught up to December…..whew. With the free prints and the low price of 15 cents a picture, it turned out that my Canadian price with shipping and exchange was only 19 cents a picture which is still a pretty good price. I’m even more excited because just last week Kodak Gallery FINALLY launched a Kodakgallery.CA! Can I just say it is about time!! I still hate paying shipping charges but hey when you live at the end of nowhere like I do you don’t have a lot of choices. Hopefully now I’ll be able to stay on top of it regularly.

My pictures filed away in their photo albums, yay!!

The top shelf is my recipe book/recipe magazine shelf.

One of the other ways I have been enjoying my pictures is on the digital picture frame that my hubbie bought for me for our anniversary. I put all my pictures from 2007 on it and love, love, love that I can see a new picture every 10 seconds. So very cool!!

I’d love to hear how others handle their pictures. Do you print and put them in photo albums, print and put them in file boxes, do photobooks or scrapbooks, leave them on the computer and watch slideshows, burn them to DVD and watch them on TV or just leave them on the camera and not worry about it?

Getting the pictures organized….FINALLY is a post from: I'm an Organizing Junkie

I’m so proud of my daughter, yesterday she placed 1st in the piano festival….very exciting!! The piano festival takes place in the next town over (about 45 minutes away) and so while there I was able to stop in and pick up my Save On pictures. I was pretty worried about it…it has been awhile since I actually liked the pictures I had printed anywhere. So with my breath held, I slowly opened the package of pictures and was…..pleasantly surprised! Whew, the color was good! No green hue anywhere (my biggest pet peeve) which was amazing. Overall I was pretty pleased. The only thing that threw me was the fact that they come smaller (4 x 5.3) so as not to have any portion of my picture cut off which is I guess what happens with the 4 x 6 size and digital pictures.

I was asked about what I do with all these pictures once I get them printed. Well if there is one thing scrapbooking taught me (and yes I’ve still given it up) is that I missed using photo albums. I missed just being able to slide my pictures in without having to worry about what paper matched the colors in the picture or what stickers tied the whole thing together. I missed how easy (and mindless) it is to just sit in front of the TV and quickly put the pictures into their new home. Oh yes, I’ve definitely missed the simplicity of photo albums and I do enjoy looking back through them (even without all the costly embellishments!) and my kids do too. I keep the albums on a low shelf in my study so they can access them at any time. I always use the same kind of photo album as well…the type that holds 2 4×6 pictures per page and has the strip in the middle which I used to use to store the negatives but now use for captions (although I still like to write the date and event on the back of the pictures).

So that is what I’ll be doing over the next couple of days….putting all 400+ pictures into my photo albums and then it’s back to the computer to upload the next 8 months! Although there shouldn’t be as many pictures in the next batch because as soon as the baby figured out that he could move well that was it for ever trying to get a half decent picture of him again!

Now that I’ve conquered my fear of starting the pictures, and have the momentum going, I don’t want to stop until it is done! I’m on a roll as they say.

Thanks again for all the encouragement and suggestions!

I got my pictures back! is a post from: I'm an Organizing Junkie

Snapfish
Kodak Gallery
Winkflash
Future Shop
Shutterfly
Creative Memories
Save on Foods

I had no idea there were so many places but unfortunately most of them are in the States which means that, although they do ship to Canada, I’d end up paying custom and broker fees on top of the printing and shipping costs. That could really add up. So when I saw the Save on Foods suggestion (we have a Save On in the next town about an hour away), I remembered I had a coupon for 10 cents off the price of each picture making it only 12 cents a picture! That sounded pretty good so I decided that yesterday I was going to go for it…..my plan was to print pictures up to Sept of last year. Something manageable and not too overwhelming…..or so I thought……

For two hours I carefully selected, amongst multiple folders, over 400 pictures for printing, adding them as I went along to the Save On site. Then after all that I clicked on upload pictures and waited, and waited and then waited some more. THREE hours later and 12:00 at night, my pictures were finally uploaded. I was almost there….only one final step stood between me and euphoria. I held my breath, wanting to get this done once and for all. I clicked on “complete my order”, that’s it, that’s all I had left and just like that the darn thing crashed and booted me right out. I sat speechless. All my carefully selected pictures gone from the site, vanished into thin air just like that. Five hours of time I didn’t really have, wasted! I was back to square one. I was tired and it was late and victory was not to be had. I went to bed in tears.

But today was another day and not one to give up, I took another deep breath and tried again. This time I’d learned my lesson though and created some folders on my hard drive called “pictures to print”. Then I dragged and dropped all the ones I wanted to print, 100 to each folder. This allowed me, on the Save On site, to select an entire file at once and because I was uploading in 100 picture batches the uploading only took one hour for each file (although this still seemed like a long time to me). Also the coupon didn’t take so I ended up paying 22 cents a picture but I don’t even care at this point. I’m just thankful I have made progress. So now I wait 1-2 days……I’m anxious to see what the quality is like.

I’m not sure if there is an easier way to do all that but it feels so good to have accomplished something that has been dragging me down for so long. I still have 8 months of pictures to go but I’m definately making headway. Once I see whether or not I like the pictures I will complete the printing of the rest of them. I like the idea of using this as my own type of organizational challenge and so my goal is to have it completed by May 2nd along with everyone else.

Wish me luck….I’d hate to fail my own challenge!

This was even harder than I thought…. is a post from: I'm an Organizing Junkie