Whether your guests sleep in the living room, a guest room, or your home office or hobby room, it is likely that your photographs will be stored somewhere near them. Perhaps they fill a guest-room closet or take up precious drawer space in your living room. In order to create a more orderly environment for your guests and yourself, you'll want to take some time to get your photographs in order.

You can display, organize, and store your personal photographs and memorabilia in many ways. Because you probably don't have enough wall space to frame and hang all of your pictures, consider a few alternatives, such as creating a scrapbook or using labeled boxes for storage.

Organizing Photos and Negatives

Begin by finding a method for organizing all of your photographs, including labeling the negatives, writing about the pictures, and storing the photographs until you are ready to mount them in your scrapbook. After you establish a method, every time you have a new roll of film developed, implement your organizational strategy immediately. You may make a rule to develop your photos within a week of taking them, for example, or to organize the photos in an album or photo box within a month of having them developed.

Also, there are a variety of things that you can purge out of your photo boxes without even having to deliberate. You don't need those floppy envelopes that photos come in, especially if you're going to use a shoebox or albums. Dump these excess items immediately and you'll be better able to sort through the photographs.

Make sure to keep your photos in a temperature-controlled environment. Basements and attics are unsafe places for photographs. Also, the way that you store your photographs will have a dramatic effect on their longevity. When possible, keep them in plastic bins. Use acid-free labels to date and describe photos. If you're able to store your photographs in a climate-controlled environment, consider professional home organizer Julie Morgenstern's method of using labeled shoeboxes. Shoeboxes don't cost anything and are the ideal size for photographs. You can arrange your photos in a variety of ways — by year, by topic, by vacation — or you can have bins for each member of your family (or each branch of your extended family). Even if you never get around to placing your photos in albums, a basic shoebox system can serve to make them accessible for years to come.

Organizing your photographs can be daunting, so don't try to tackle them all in an afternoon or over a weekend. Instead, make a weekly commitment to a manageable goal, such as creating one shoebox a week. You can even pencil your photo-organizing time into your calendar.

You might also want to create a simple box for pictures and keepsakes pertaining to each family member. These boxes will probably need to be larger than a shoebox if you want to save children's art, report cards, and other larger items. Be selective as you create your memento box. Choose only the best to keep — those that most clearly represent the phase your child is in and the progression of their abilities. Perhaps you'll want to limit yourself to one from each month. After several years of collecting small mementos, you can turn the contents of this box into an album.

Making Scrapbooks

After you've reviewed and organized all of your photos, choose your favorites for incorporation into your photo album or scrapbook. Choose an actual album or scrapbook that conveys a specific theme, such as family vacations, holidays, family memories, or childhood. After you've decided which album to begin with, determine the sequence of the album — chronological, by themes, or by events.

The number of photographs you can get on a page will depend on the page size, the size of the photographs, and how much you crop the background of the photographs. You can, of course, be creative and overlap your photographs.

When you begin to place your photos in scrapbooks, take care to purchase only albums with acid-free pages that won't damage your photos. If you do use a glue stick, use only glue sticks that are designed for photographs. Also, you can attach newspaper clippings to the pages of your album with a similar washable, nontoxic glue stick. Plastic photo sleeves are ideal for putting photos into albums quickly and for quick, safe removal.

Converting to Digital Photos

The digital revolution is one of the greatest things that has happened to photo hoarders (and those who live with them). Instead of stacks and stacks of loose, unidentifiable photos, you can now store all of your photos on your computer and only print those you love.

In addition to taking digital photos, you can also convert your old photos to a digital system. You can use a scanner to scan your existing photos to create high-resolution electronic files on your computer's hard drive, on Zip disks, or on writable CD-ROMs. The Hewlett-Packard Photosmart photo scanner, for example, is relatively inexpensive and allows you to scan photos, negatives, or slides using any PC-based personal computer. When you want to develop photos, you can use an online service or have them developed at your regular retail developer.

Many of these services also offer the option of creating photo books or calendars. These photo books can make a great gift for friends and family, and they provide a quick, easy way to create albums with the click of your mouse.

Back Up all Digital Images

Although most people have heard that digital images should be backed up, few people actually create backup files. If your entire archive of images is dependant upon your computer, however, you are in a vulnerable position. Computers can be destroyed in an instant by fire, flood, lightning, or hard-drive failure, and with the loss of your computer, you could easily lose a lifetime of photographs. An easy backup method is to create CDs with your images and store them in a different part of your home. There are a variety of ways to create reliable backups for your files and computers. To learn more about creating backups, see Chapter 5, which covers the home office.

Whether you're creating back-up for your photographs or preparing your home for guests, every bit of planning helps. By taking steps to organize and plan for your guests, you can create an environment that is restful for them and peaceful for you. No matter where your guests sleep, you can make them feel comfortable by paying attention to small details and adding comforting touches to their sleeping space. When it comes to guests, a little bit of thoughtfulness in advance goes a long way.