How To Organize Your Photos and Memorabilia from a Short Trip

This post is like nothing that you have ever seen from me before. With the new year approaching, I thought that a little series about organizing photos may be great! I'll take you through some of my favorite tips down below, but check out my video tutorial too for even more information.

The video tutorial will probably be the best method to try and understand my organization's madness. Although I will try to explain it here, the video is a great backup. Now, for this organization tutorial, I show you how I organize photos and memorabilia from a 3-day trip that I took in September. You will need photo holders, index cards or dividers, a pen, and your memorabilia. Additional supplies you may need include tabs, an extra envelope, and rubber bands. I hope you enjoy the process!

If you have your supplies ready and want some step-by-step instructions we can dive right in! The first step that I would suggest is to try and divide your photos up by date. Just put them in piles based on date, they do not have to be in chronological order quite yet, but if they are that's a plus! This method here is great for shorter trips, if you have a longer trip to organize, don't fear! I'll have a tutorial on that soon.

Once your photos are sorted into their designated piles according to date, you'll want to gather all of your memorabilia. Now, all of my memorabilia fit into only one date. If your memorabilia applies to multiple days or spans the whole trip put the piece of memorabilia in the pile that it first applies to. For example, if you have your hotel key cards and you stayed there the whole trip, I would typically associate that with check-in day. Continue to sort out your memorabilia into your coordinating piles.

Once you are completely done sorting the photos and memorabilia into their appropriate piles, grab an index card or divider and place one on top of each pile. Take your writing utensil (I used a sharpie) and write the date of that pile on the top. You can see in my photos how that might look. Underneath that, you'll want to write everything that you did that day on that pile. This is a good time also to try and put your photos in chronological order (if you are scrapbooking them that way). Once all of your piles have the date and associated activities or places on their corresponding index card you need to find a container to store these in.

To store all of my sets of photos I just used the photo envelopes that the printers delivered them in. There are many options when wanting to store these. You could use those clear hard photo boxes that stack nicely or you could use an expandable file folder. Use whatever you think would work best for you and your memory keeping style. As for putting them inside of these holders, I put two days in one and two days in another. If you want each set in a different container then by all means do so. If you'd like you can also label the outside of these containers with the date to be even more organized.

I hope that this tutorial and video explanation will help you feel more confident in organizing your photos from shorter trips! I cannot wait to dive into the memories of this trip and document them. I hope you enjoyed these organizational tips and if you would like more information or more posts like these let me know in the comments! Thanks for stopping by!