Chronological or Themed?

There's a great debate going on and it involves you, your scrapbook pages and yes, your albums. The debate centers on the best way to organize your layouts. After all, you have taken the time to create the layouts, and now you need to decide how to manage them.

Here are some ideas to debate and decide what method is best for your memories.

Chronological

Simply put, with the chronological method, your layouts are organized into albums in the order the photos were taken. This can be broken down into an album per month, per season or even per year. This doesn't mean that you must scrapbook your photos in order, but simply that you keep the layouts in order by date.

To keep these albums organized and easy to manage you can sort those months, seasons (or quarters) or years into a color-coded system. For example, if you organize by the four seasons a great way to organize those four groupings would be to assign each an album color. Then if you have more than one album of layouts for a particular season, add another of that same color. This will give you an easier way to identify those different albums.

There are some drawbacks to keeping only chronological albums. Many scrappers comment they feel they are always behind on their photos. They feel they can't keep up and are working on photos from years ago. Another concern, if you have children, is how you would divide up the album if you want to pass along memories to them. Making copies is an option but not quite the same as having the page. A new option is to scan or photograph the pages and save them to disk.

Themed Albums

Themes are abundant: school, vacations, holidays, friends, family, pets, your home, and your hobbies -- the list can go on and on. The possibilities for themes are endless. Themed albums can be as simple as a beautiful mini book that you leave on a coffee table, a smaller book of all your favorite flowers at your grandma's house that you present to her as a gift, or a book of the 10 fish you've gone through in a month and that your child named and wants to remember. Themes are everywhere, but what is the best way to organize with themes?

Once again, a color-coded album system designating a color for every category would be ideal. Perhaps green for your family, yellow for friends, red for your home and so on. As each album fills, add another of that same color to the shelf. If you have more than one child the same applies. Perhaps choose your child's favorite color and designate that his or her album color. You can label the album spine with a picture of your child and his or her name.

Some drawbacks to themed organization are that you may have a harder time deciding what album category a layout will fit under. Also, if you have more than one child and they are all in the pictures on the layout, you have to decide. Will the layout go in their individual album or perhaps into a family album? You may also prefer using one particular brand of albums and keep continuity with those for all themes. It's not always practical or affordable to buy several albums at a time. So maybe a better solution is just to keep within a color family and use any album brand.

There is no right or wrong way on how to best organize your layouts. This debate will continue as long as there are scrapbookers. Only you can answer this debate best as fits your personal needs.