Last month, I shared my strategy on how to simplify post-vacation scrapping. In the spirit of letting you know I’m a real person (and not an uber-organized freak of nature), I wanted to give you an update on my progress (or lack therof).
1. Unpack – I’ve packed and unpacked several times now and am preparing to do it yet again. While the actual vacation unpacking went well, I’m only just now doing the laundry accumulated July 29 – August 6 on a work trip. I’m quite impressed (or sad?) that I had enough underwear and outfits to last 2+weeks. All this travel has certainly gotten in the way of Steps 2-10.
2. Write – EPIC FAIL. (Having grown tired of the kids making “fail” interjections, I actually had to Google this phrase to understand that it began as a meme.) I am the most sad that this task has not yet been completed. The more time that passes, the further those little details and stories fade away.
3. Organize – I am midway through this task. I know where all the photos are, but due to space constraints, they are not co-located. I’ve not yet converted one camera’s worth to DNG.
4. Purge – Moderate success! I am happy to report that I did cull nearly 1/3 of the photos shot with the BIG CAMERA. However, I’ve not even taken a peep at those taken with the others.
5. Back up – Everything is backed up to Mozy!
6. Favorite – I was beginning to feel so guilty at being “behind”, that I grabbed the best of the best and sent them to Facebook. In the end, there weren’t too many images I would deem frame-worthy, but quite a few great stories to tell on scrapbook pages. I’ve still not taken the leap of sending any to be printed.
7. Choose – I chose pre-vacation that I would be giving attention to every photo that I didn’t delete. As much as I try to convince myself that its OK to edit on the fly, my desire to have secondary backup on Flickr of my final jpegs still pushes me to complete the task.
8. Batch – My biggest timesaver is batch converstion from DNG to JPG once editing is completed. I’m working on developing an action to expedite saving images for sharing on my personal blog.
9. Share – As I mentioned in #7, Flickr is my final destination. However, I need to finish the time-consuming step of editing before I can get there.
10. Plan – I rotate between giving my scrapping plan serious thought and trying to ignore it. I am completely torn between a clean photobook style or a more traditional paper-scrapped style. Also, with my interest in Library of Memories, I’m in a wonky place. I haven’t scrapped in far too long – knowing that my time should be spent on getting these photos finished.
Lessons Learned – My biggest tip for making this strategy work is to not schedule another 9 days of travel immediately following the vacation. While I was able to do some sorting and editing, the lack of routine made a whole hog effort nearly impossible.
However, I doubt most of you would face this hurdle. In a more practical sense, being more deliberate about this project would certainly help. I suggest to you (and me) that the FlyLady approach might work well. Take just 15 minutes to do as much as you can. Fit these 1 or 2 of these chunks in every day to see fantastic progress in no time.
So, come clean with me! Where are your post-vacation memories?
I’m not finished with my vacation photos either, but I’m off to a good start. I’ve had some printed and even mailed a print back to Grandma. I’ve scrapped a few pages, but I still have a few more I want to do. But I’m not stressing about it. I’ll get them done eventually.
I’ve been keeping a travel journal for every trip since 2003. Every night, I write a synopsis of the day’s activities and put all the memorabilia in a labeled envelope. When something memorable happens during the day, the journal is readily accessible to take notes. This has helped immeasurably with all post-vacation processing. I found that if I type my notes in Word after the trip, it’s pretty easy to copy and paste into digital pages or print for hybrid pages.