Do you have beginner scrapbooker overload?

I was reading a post in a scrapbooking forum recently, and I came across a question from a beginner scrapbooker who really sounded (to me) like she was putting a lot of unnecessary pressure on herself.  She had sorted her photos into piles for different categories, but some photos didn’t “fit” in any pile/category.  She asked if she needed to scrapbook them in order of date.  I felt bad for her, because that used to be me, and while I enjoyed scrapbooking way back then, I enjoy it much more now.  Here’s some advice if you’re a beginner and are feeling that same pressure. 

Don’t overthink the process.  You’ve divided your photos into piles.  What categories do you have?  People?  Vacations?  Holidays?  If you have photos that you don’t have a pile for, it sounds like you need to make another pile/category.  I used to scrapbook my photos by theme.  I felt like ALL the birthday party photos needed to go in their own birthday album, and ALL the party photos needed to be together in the designated album.  I don’t do that anymore.  I might pull one of the birthday party photos that is my daughter and her best friend and make a page about their friendship, what my daughter’s friend means to her, how they’ve been friends since they were 3, etc.  Nothing to do with the birthday, it’s just a great photo and I want to use it for a different purpose.  I find myself doing that more and more these days.  Chances are, between me and my husband both loving photography and taking photos, there is probably another photo that looks very similar to it anyway, and the one I pulled won’t even be missed! 

Do you have to use all the photos?  NO.  They’re your pictures, and it’s your scrapbook.  YOU make the rules.  If you don’t like the picture, don’t put it in the scrapbook.  If you REALLY don’t like the photo, throw it away.  Yes, I really said that.  Why keep a photo you don’t like?  Ok, you could also GIVE it away.  If you like it but not enough to scrapbook it, put it in an acid-free photo storage box.  They’re $3 or $4 at Hobby Lobby or you can buy them at Michaels with a coupon.  If you can’t find a pile to put the photo in when you’re sorting, maybe you should think about do you really want the photo anyway, and if not then store it in the box.  Store doubles in the boxes too.  I have all my stored photos separated and labeled by year so I at least have an idea of where to look for a photo if I feel the need at a future time.

When I started scrapbooking 11 years ago, I thought I needed to put every single photo, good or bad (and some are really bad), in my scrapbook and I wanted to scrapbook them all in order chronologically as they happened.  I really put a lot of pressure on myself, and I regret that.  Cause if you do that, frankly, you’re going to die someday and there will be a million photos stashed somewhere in your house that aren’t in the scrapbooks.  You know the episode of Friends where Ross & Monica’s grandmother dies and while looking for some shoes in her closet Ross finds box after box of sugar packets and bumps one of them and a million sugar packets come raining down all over his head?  That’ll be you, except with photos instead of sugar packets.  Now I pick out my favorite photos, the ones I really love, the ones I want to tell a story about, the ones I want my daughter to know about, the ones that are meaningful to me, and I only scrapbook those.  Just those photos.  The rest go in photo boxes or in small photo albums tied with a ribbon on the spine and labeled by year.  I put those in a shelving unit in my family room so that my family and guests can pull them off the shelves and look at them.  And WOW do I feel better! 

Recently I also started NOT going in chronological order.  Scrapbooking is so much more fun now.  Because frankly, by the time I get to THIS year in my scrapbooks, I’m not going to remember what happened in any of the photos from this year (my memory is shot), unless I journal very extensively about it, and if I’m going to do the journaling I might as well just go ahead and make the whole page.  So I alternate.  One day I do current photos and the next day I use older photos for my scrapbooks. 

Just do whatever YOU want.  You’re the boss!