Categories & Curating
This is the week that (what appears to be) a course on photo-organizing begins to reveal its true identity as a storytelling course! Today we dive into the 4 general categories of US, PEOPLE, PLACES and THINGS.
We will also begin to play with this idea of curation so that ultimately we can create, adapt and refine a customized system and a super-effective approach to documenting and preserving personal and family stories.
💜 How quickly could you locate 4 photos of people you love sharing a HUG?
➡️ Week 5 Tasks
Work with 2-Star prints to make physical category piles and practice moving printed photos into the US, PEOPLE, PLACES and THINGS categories. If possible, do this for at least 100 prints.
Set up temporary folders (or albums) in your photo management application and practice copying favorite (and supporting) images into the US, PEOPLE, PLACES and THINGS categories. If possible, do this for 2020 and/or the other year you chose to work with on the Digital Discoveries worksheet.
Print the 4 category questions PDFs and thoughtfully answer questions. Begin compiling lists with the details you gather.
Complete the sticky notes activity with any documenting efforts you’ve made in the past.
“Memory recall is not just pulling things from the storage of memories, rather it is a process of creativity in which the relevant information is gathered from the scattered, jigsaw puzzle-like information in the brain.”
Categories & Curating 🗄
Remember that we are just beginning our exploration of categories this week and the goal is to practice visually placing some of our pictures in a new context where they can mingle with other pictures and begin to show us connections and patterns we might not otherwise notice. Good storytellers love character development and the description of a particular backdrop or setting. In fact these two aspects of story are just as important as the plot—they make what happened more interesting. With categories supporting you, you will be able to more fully document the characters and the settings in your stories. This is plot-enhancing and makes for a more compelling arc in your overall narrative.
Don’t worry too much about where we’re headed. Just build on the sorting you did last week to playfully move some of your photos around. Trust the process!
Printable Handouts 🖨
Many of us started scrapbooking in an era when it was quite possible to churn out pages for nearly all of the pictures we took, and working to do so became a benchmark for productivity. Someone could actually be “caught up.” This isn’t our reality anymore and while the sheer number of pictures and images we swim in can feel overwhelming, we have an opportunity to do something that no generation before us was able to do. We can choose from ALL the photographs illustrations for stories we truly value.
Yes, we’re still going to make pages with cute pictures—just for FUN—but with a Library of Memories system to support us, we will be able to do so much more, more often!
Print the full set of 4 Questions PDFs, but also print enough of the Us Questions for each person in your immediate family.
💜 You CAN do this. Don’t make it hard.
I’m here when you need me—in fact, consider yourself HUGGED!
p.s. Our LIVE session has been posted!
