organize my wedding photos

A couple of weeks ago I worked on designing a photo book that I thought would please my mother and my Nana, so I could a) get this goal complete and b) use up my “free photo album” coupon I got when I signed up to MyPublisher.com. I think the interface could use a little work, but I eventually made something I was proud of, and when I was done I got my wife to look it over. To my surprise, she was so impressed, she thought we should get one for ourselves, too. So I actually ended up ordering 3 albums, and while they were a little pricey, the whole “free book” thing made it much more reasonable to purchase.

I picked them up from the FedEx office today, and they’re actually quite lovely. So lovely, I’m surprised I had any hand in putting them together whatsoever. So I’m done – except for my brothers, but really, they’re just going to get a couple of photos in a cheap-o album. That’s barely organizing at all.

(Number two in the “wedding-related” goals that I need to clear off before our second anniversary…)

• an album for us
• an album for my parents
• an album for my Nana
• an album for my wife’s parents
• and albums for our two sets of brothers

So that’s about 1/6 of the way there. I’ll consider myself done when I’ve done my family’s albums, but that means I have to do a lot of work. Luckily, I have a few ideas.

You know, I’m still just as married with a box full of wedding photos as I am with them all in albums. They’ll still be there when I want to look at them…but until then…

My wife and I hired a really great wedding photographer, and if it was just those 200 or so I had to organize, it wouldn’t be a big obstacle to overcome. But we have another 150 other photos that were taken by our friends that are also really good, and we have to go over them too. But then again, that wouldn’t be too hard, except we have to make photo albums for our parents too, of course. And our grandmothers. (And possibly our brothers.) So yeah, this one’s going to be a hard one. Lots of work to do.

Yup I started scanning my wedding pictures into my computer today. I got thru 75 so far. There are still alot but its a start. :)

Things are all tagged and favorites are picked out. I even printed some out so family would finally leave me alone. But, the only photo in our house is in an 8×10 frame on the entryway table, and I haven’t designed an album.

That’s the next goal. Good. Heaven.

^{I don’t even want to get into adding “edit wedding video” as a goal.}

We were married on November 24th last year, and I have just finished picking my favorites from the photographer’s batch. Now I’m going through and tagging them, then I will have to edit the ones for print and albums.

Who knows when we’ll actually have an album. It’s not easy to take the job out of the photographer’s hands, perhaps I should’ve spent the extra money and had her do it?

Nah.

The family (and friends) have bugged the hell out of me, asking where are the photos, when can I see them, how long does it take, how many are there, is there a shot of me, where is the picture of so-and-so?

But after tagging, the main thing is to print some for my grandma who is returning home on Sunday.

SUNDAY. Good god, I’m getting back to work.
Thank you Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Bridge!

WHEW! There were actually over 5000 images to go through. It was hard to cull out the best ones. I used ACDSee photo manager, which was a great use of $40 – pretty cheap for a program, and a very decent one at that. In ACDSee, I put all the photos into a wedding album, then classified all those images into one of 12 sub-albums (e.g., prep, ceremony, portraits, reception). The hubby and I looked at every photo and marked whether it was in or out in ACDSee using ratings. We then synced that up with the photographer’s online preview website so that the worst photos were hidden. Next, I went through all the “in” photos and marked about 20% of them as favorites in ACDSee. Finally, I created folders in the photographer’s website that roughly matched our sub-albums, and put the favorites in those folders for guests to see. I think it’s a nice, guided way to let guests see your wedding photos, rather than wading through 5000!

The hardest part of picking the favorites was comparing a bunch of images and figuring out which was “best” of the series. My eyeballs are ready to fall out of their sockets. The next hardest thing was deciding whether to include an image which isn’t exactly a favorite and may not be in the sharpest focus, but captures a moment or visually fills in the story line. There were a few like that.

Whatever, it’s done! Oh sure, there’s now the work of actually DOING something with ‘em, like making albums from these photos (which is the whole point of organizing your wedding photos). But the hard work is now over, and the rest is more fun. Yippee!

So people can view them! I’m so pleased with our wedding photography, but there are 4000+ (yes, four THOUSAND) photos to sift through. I want to pull out bad ones and mark our favorites before making the online album public, but I’m so bad at committing to do that. Plus I want to tag each picture so I can easily find ones containing certain people to make photo CDs for them.

Okay, how about if I shoot one month from now – November 24 – as the release date for the album. I can rank them by Nov. 8 and tag them by Nov. 24; two weeks per task. With nine CDs to go through, that means 1-2 days per disc per task. Doable, right? Let’s see…

I have like 600 photos and half of them are in the album that the photographer gave us and the other half are in their envelopes from the developer. It drives me a little crazy because I kind of want to mix in the professional and non-professional pictures in one giant, chronological album… but there are a bunch of really similar (if not exactly the same) pictures of many things… plus maybe I really do want to keep the professional ones separate… which means making TWO albums, one professional, one non… both chronological… It drives me nuts just thinking about it.