The Challenge: to sort and let go!

I believe the older you are the more photographs you have tucked away. Some in dilapidated albums or cute hat boxes. Some may even be stuffed in photo boxes you bought thinking you would take on that great task of organizing them. Maybe, they were handed down to you, so you feel obligated to treat them like they were bars of gold.

If you are like me, you sometimes get them out to start organizing and you get so caught up in the memories and shuffling to see more pictures, that after a couple of hours, you just stuff them back where they came from and decide to attempt this task another day. Whew! And, if you are like me, you have done this more than once.

We are lucky, however, to even have these pictures to look at. In this day of digital photography, we carry around most of our pictures on our phones or digital cameras. Some times they make it to our home computers (again, with great intentions of organizing them) and some times they don’t. We either delete them to make space for more or we lose them.

How many times have you gone through the ‘pics’ on your phone and deleted certain ones because they were blurry or not someone’s best shot? Or, perhaps they are pictures of scenery that seemed important to you at the time, but now, months later, you realize that without a human reference they are pretty meaningless. The key here is that YOU get to make that decision about what to keep and what can be deleted. You should have this same privilege with your printed photos.

What really scares me, is that future generations won’t value ‘my’ photos as much as I do. If I don’t take action today to create memories of these photos, then they may get in the hands of  someone who will just toss them because they can’t identify the people in them or that they are so old that restoration seems impossible. I believe, however, that if they were sorted, organized, and manageable, they would be more apt to be cherished. And, that is the real point of pictures, isn’t it? To remember the people in them and cherish the memories they made for us?

My challenge for you is to stop procrastinating and take action.
Try to go through your photos… sort… and let go. This is the first step. Make your ‘piles’ manageable.

If you don’t, those boxes of photos will remain just that, boxes that someone pulls out every couple of years to look through , get over whelmed by, and stuff back away in their storage places or even get tossed.

Meanwhile, we are collecting more photos!!!



This is a picture of my grandmother (front left) with her siblings (all seated on the left) and their spouses (all seated on the right). My great grandmother and great grandfather are at the head of the table and standing are many of the ‘cousins’.

This picture was handed down to me in fair condition. I restored it and made it into a Scrap Page that I hope future generations will cherish, not toss.

Ya Ya