Best way to organize children's photos?

[Anonymous]

This may seem like a really silly question, but I am stumped as to how best to organize and create albums for my infant and toddler. I did a 1 year album for my toddler from birth to her first birthday. That seemed simple, but now DD is almost 3 and I also have a 10 month old so do I keep doing separate albums for each of them based on their year of birth? Or do I do it by calendar year (which means year 1-2 will really only be about 9 months since they have spring birthdays)? What about family albums - is that another album in addition to their individual albums? And at what point should I be grouping ages - for instance a 3-5 year album verus a 3, a 4 and 5 year old album. If anyone has had some success with this, I'd really appreciate the input!

[Anonymous]

When I only had two kids, my albums were always up to date, but they are now so woefully behind that I'm not sure I'm qualified to talk about this. But, here is what I did/do. I do an album for each child and a family album. I tend to go chronologically for the most part. However, I do only one set of pages for school and put them in one place in the album instead of say doing a page for the concert, a page for the play, a page for first day, etc. I do not use identical photos for each album, but tailor the album toward the particular child. So, if some event was not a big deal for one of the kids, it won't be in that kid's album. I also do separate family vacation albums.

I find that I can get 1-2 years in an album before it gets too full. I don't have any prescribed time to move to a new album other than when the previous one was full. Some people I know go from birthday to birthday. But kids were adopted (none at birth), so I wouldn't have that many photos from the first year with them if I did it that way.

In order to keep myself organized so that I don't forget what we did, I also keep an ongoing blog about my family on which I post photos and talk about what we do. So, I can go back to the blog to keep my scrapbooks organized and to be sure I don't miss anything that was important.

Have fun!