The Not So Scrapworthy

If something is not scrapworthy, then is it trashworthy? Maybe. I used to think that potentially scrapworthy things were not really trashworthy either. For example, consider excess photographs from the era of film cameras. I take many more photographs digitally than I ever did with film, but i am very selective as to what I print. Today, most of what I print ends up in a scrapbook. One thing that helps today is editing photographs prior to printing so that printed photographs won’t later be discarded for quality or size reasons…though of course then you then have digital clutter…

I had 2.5 Cropper Hopper Photo Cases full of photographs. These were not photographs waiting to be scrapbooked but were photographs that have been rejected from the scrapworthy. I’ve already thrown away poor quality photographs (e.g., blurry, horrible lighting, out of focus, etc.). But why was I keeping all of these not so scrapworthy photographs?

I decided to purge. I sorted the boxes. I selected some photographs to keep for my daughter to use in arts and crafts projects. I kept a selection of photographs of things like family members, animals, buildings, flowers, and boats. These will go in her arts and craft supply box.

Excess prints went in the trash. Then I moved onto the photographs that are available online. I used to send my film away to get it developed and the company I used stores your prints online. Someday I will get the rest of those photos downloaded so that I have a digital backup. Again, this was a easy; the rest went in the trash.

The most difficult to sort through are those photographs without digital back-ups. But if a photograph has not been scrapbooked or placed in a picture frame, why am I keeping it? I kept some of the older photographs just in case.

I also mailed photographs to several friends and family members. If they were in some of my photographs, I mailed those photographs to them to keep or trash. Everyone was surprised and happy to get the photographs. A few weeks after sorting through all my photographs, I moved to a new home. Moving without all these excess photographs was much easier.