How to organize School Photos

It's the end of November all of our kids school photos have come in. Now it's time for me to trim them into four piles (I have 3 girls and a prince):



A personal trimmer works great for this. It's a sturdy little trimmer and trims wallet photos up nicely.




I keep a framed 8x10 photo of each of the kids in our hallway.







I keep all of their 8x10's in the frame and just put the new one on top of the old ones each year. Before I hang the frame though, I take all the pictures out and line them up on the floor or the dining room table for our family to look at. It's a very fun activity! It's amazing to see the changes from preschool on up!

5x7 pictures: I send to one grandma who requests them (and actually displays them in her home, God Bless her!) and file one 5x7 for each of their School Albums. I also file any Class Pictures for their School album as well.

Wallet photos: I keep one wallet photo of each child to update my mini brag book that I carry around in my purse and I give one set to My Hero to update his wallet. When I was a kid, I exchanged wallet photos with friends but that doesn't seem to be the trend around here. I do offer the kids wallet photos of their siblings to update their wallets (pick a good day to ask this).

I use another set of wallet photos to update the Title Pages of our kid's School Albums. I label the picture with their age and grade.



All of the extra wallet photos I tuck inside our Christmas cards going to family.

Pictures and album making can seem overwhelming but when you break it into bite-size steps (15 minutes, 30 minutes) you will be amazed at the things you can accomplish. All of the things that I did this past week were done in several quick steps:

1. trim photos
2. update 8x10 frames (and since I'm a busy mom of 4 kids, I did this in 4 steps on 3 different days!)
3. update mini brag book
4. ask hubby and family about updating their wallets - give them sets
5. update school album title pages (since i do this every year, all i had to do is add the mini wallet photo to the title page, label it and add a 5x7 photo to the appropriate grade section of the album)
6. set aside leftover wallet photos or other sizes to mail to relatives with Christmas packages/cards.

Happy Scrappin',
:DL