How To Organize Photos: Simple Photo Storage Solution

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Being a very sentimental person, I have lots of hard copy photos. Not only do I have loads of pictures from pre-digital photo days, I try to order prints a couple times a year to remember holidays, vacations and family gatherings.

My old system (the black basket with stacks of pictures) wasn’t working anymore and it was really hard to find a specific picture when I needed it. I pulled them all out and re-sorted the stacks into groups that made sense to me.

The groups I went with are more based on stages of life and places lived. When I’m trying to think of a picture I want to locate, I think “that happened when we lived here…” so that’s my basis for organization.

I picked up 6×9 manila envelopes from Dollar Tree and wrote the year + a few major categories on each envelope.

I decided to store the photos in a larger tote that would allow them to stand up straight. I found mine at Target – it was much cheaper than anything I could find on Amazon (here’s a similar option from Amazon).

This size also left room for me to add some older scrapbooks and larger photo prints that I would like to protect.

In a perfect world these would also be scanned and stored on a computer – but that’s a big project for another day. 🙂

Not all of my photos are in storage. I like to display recent family photos throughout the house, and I’ve collected all our Disney trip photos in this Dollar Tree album. It is in the living room so that we can flip through it whenever we want.

This album has pictures 3 separate trips, so I start a new series of photos with a label notating the date of the trip.

Could your photo stash use a little organization? It doesn’t have to be a fancy or expensive project – and the results are so satisfying!