Help! How do YOU handle digitial photo overload??

me - about 2 years old

Ever since I was young, I have loved having my own camera and taking pictures.  I remember  saving up my money when I was about 12 years old and buying a little 35 mm camera.  It cost $12.99 (+ tax!) from the local drug store and looked like a little black box and had a connection on top for a flip flash. 

I remember being very selective about what I took pictures of because those were the days where you had to pay to develop your film in order to see your pictures.  (All you young people reading this - at this point you should GASP - and then maybe wonder what I'm talking about.)

When my roll of film was full I would take my saved up money to the drug store and have my film developed.  It was always a combination of exciting and disappointing to get my photos back.  There were always a few that were blurry or had my finger in a corner of the camera.  The rest would be fine and I would carefully arrange them in a photo album.

Enter digital photography.  In early 2004 I bought my first digital camera.  Life was never the same.  Yes I was cautious at first, with the number of photos I took.  I would dutifully upload them to the computer and have them printed by an online photo developer.  Yet even in my "cautious" state, I was suddenly dealing with a lot more photos than I was used to.  I knew I didn't have room to be stuffing photo albums full at an alarming rate, so I resorted to using photo boxes AND photo albums.  The albums being for the best or most interesting pictures.

By the time Hunter was born, I suddenly found I couldn't even keep up with this method.  I need to insert here that I neglected an important part of my dealing with photos.  I could not simply put them in an album or box.  I HAD to label them.  This meant writing the person's name, date, and location.  On every. Single. Photo.  (I had been frustrated in the past with looking through boxes of photos at relatives homes, and not being able to identify who was in the picture.  I determined this would never happen to my photos!)

So guess what.  I have quite an assortment of boxes of developed pictures which never made it into boxes OR albums.  Starting from 2008 through 2012.  I haven't even developed many pictures in the last year.  I do upload them and back them up. 

When Lilly was born, I took at least one photo of her almost every day of her life.  This was crucial to me because we had no idea how long she would live!  After she died, I uploaded a ton of these photos online and had them developed.  I was excited when they came until I began looking in the big box filled with a dozen or so smaller photo packets.  There was no sense to the order the photos were in!  Pictures from January may be mixed into a packet with pictures from June and October.  UGH!

I began spending an hour a week trying to put the photos in order in photo boxes.  Now I love to organize, but this was making me nuts.   Every week I'd get mad at the photo developer all over again for sending me my pictures out of order and giving me all that extra work.

Then Solomon was born, in September of 2012.  And I have not tried to organize any photos since.  Oh I still take photos at a ridiculous rate (maybe between 250 - 400 per month) and I upload them to my computer.  But that's it. 

NOW I WANT TO ASK FOR YOUR HELP.

I really want to put together some albums and scrapbooks as everyone in my family enjoy looking at them.  I have so many ideas in my head.  But I can not decide the most efficient approach to take for this.  PLEASE - I would love to hear from you how you handle your photos.  Maybe that will give me some ideas!

THANK YOU!!  I hope to hear from you!

(N.B. Just a tip if you are going to leave a comment - I have been having trouble leaving comments on other blogger blogs lately. Whatever I write disappears the first time, then stays when I redo it a second time.  Maybe that's just me.  But - now when I take the time to type out a comment, I copy it just in case it disappears.  Then if it does I can just paste it into the comment box again.)