One Big Jumble-y Mess

So, my big goal for this year's "scrapbook more" resolution is to create a birthday book for each of the kids by 4/25 (Owen's 5th birthday).

Then, every year when their birthday rolls around, I'll add another birthday lay out to the album.


This goal sounds easy enough....if I could just find photos from each of their birthdays!!

Most of 2006, all of 2006, and all of 2008 are good to go. Organized like a champ.

The first half of 2006 and before?!? UGH....NOOOOO rhyme or reason whatsoever to the photo organization....er, should I say DISorganization?!? No common naming convention, no logical folder structure. Just one big jumble-y mess of pictures.

Imagine a shoebox filled with random photos....stacks of shoe boxes, filled with random photos. That's precisely where I'm at except that the shoe boxes are digital.

And, not only are they digital but they are on our home PC which is an unreliable, slow, dinosaur of a machine that already crashed on us once (that we paid $500 to fix so I could get my pictures off of it). Only, I never got my pictures OFF of it, they're still on there.

I'm going to need to spend a good 60-80 hours getting them organized. And getting organized is KEY to speedy scrapping.

It's a necessary evil, but I've gotta do it.

I already started last night by backing up everything to CDs. I already made 5 discs and have many more to go. Then, I'm going to copy the pictures from my CDs to our external hard drive. Why, you ask, don't I just back things up directly from the dinosaur to the external hard drive? Good question. Good answer...the dinosaur does not have a high speed USB port to which I can connect the external hard drive. That would be too easy.

So, instead of scrapping another birthday last night, I scrapped some ice skating pictures taken earlier this month (and organized beautifully).

Don't even get me started on the pre-2002 non-digital pictures! Oy. Vay.