Previously on the blog, we covered how to plan and prepare for photo organizing sessions.

Today we are going to cover sorting.

Set Up Your Photo Work Station

Whether you are using prints or digital images, your processing station will feature three sections:

• To be processed
• Processing
• Processed

Basically, the idea is work from one section to another. For example, you pick up a photo (to be processed), decide on its destination (processing) and then place it in the proper pile (processed). If you are sorting prints, be sure to have a pencil, marker, index cards, plastic zipper bags or other small storage containers at hand. If you are working on digital photos, get your computer ready and set up some empty folders.

Sorting Photos

Set a timer or set aside a certain amount of photos.

Instead of diving in to all of your photos right away, either set your timer to count time spent or reach into your stack of photos and count out a certain number of them, upside down (to prevent you from looking at all images). Or you might get a ruler and measure out a half-inch or inch stack to tackle prints. If you are sorting digital photos, select a number of photos that you will process.

Sort

Roughly sort photos into some sort of pattern. Remember, the piles that you create don’t have to be finalized just yet; take the time to do some sorting to get an idea of the photos that you do have. Here’s a few ways you could sort photos:

• Year (day, month, year, seasons, decades…)
• Occasion (births, birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, graduations, vacations, everyday/just because events…)
• Location (the beach, the mountains, the country, the city, at home, away…)
• Subject (friends, family, pink flamingoes, blue skies, candy bars, old cars…)
• Size (3x5s, 4x6s, 8x10s, landscape, locket…)
• Type (black and white, sepia, color, special tints…)

Label

If you are processing prints, use index cards to help label piles and then place prints into a temporary storage holder such as a plastic zippered bag, a shoe box, etc. If you are processing digital photos, create and label digital folders.

Work until you finish

Keep sorting and labeling. Don’t stop until your stack is complete for your work session.

Bonus Tips:

• If you want to identify people, places and occasions in photos, save IDing photos for another organizing session, or consider starting a running list of questions to ask family members or friends, or for you to do more research yourself.

• If you feel you might be tempted to look through all of your photo prints during a sorting session, take out only what you will process and leave the master collection in another room so that you can focus on sorting.

Check back soon for the next entry in our photo organizing series!