First I am not my photos. If I loose them, I loose them. It doesn't end the world. Even if I loose every photo I've ever taken I'll take more. ;) There is no such thing, especially in this digital age, as "safe". That said. I download my images from my memory media to my computer's hard drive. The images are in Minolta RAW format at this point. If they are important I burn the whole set to DVD for safe keeping. Then I review the initial images with my RAW editing software and make basic dark room fixes there. (push or pull the exposure, fix white balance, etc.) That software converts each image I choose into a format Photoshop can read. I am now done with my RAW images. I then open the chosen images in Photoshop and apply filters, airbrush out blemishes or unsightly elements, crop, whatever. These are then saved as JPEGs (STILL FULL SIZE) and uploaded to Smugmug which will present the "web friendly" resizes for me. I have NOT reduced image quality. I can then clean all images off my hard drive. Done, back to a nice clean dark room. I manage my digital dark room the same way I would a physical one. (I'm also a neat freak and do NOT leave clutter laying around. Digital or otherwise.) All my print worthy images go to smugmug. Most are displayed for the world to see (the small resizes, original printing size files are not available to the public thanks very much). They are safely backed up and managed by smugmug. If I need to have one printed (I don't use smugmug their printing is NOT pro quality) I download the original image and mail it to my printer. They print it. The downloaded file is discardable. I'm not attached to my images. I take thousands and thousands of images a year. The fraction I consider good enough to print/frame get stored on smugmug. The rest get burned (in raw unedited format) to DVD if I ever want to retrieve them. Most of my play images (garden, walks, scenery do NOT get backed up. Portraits and such do.) But all editing is done with disposable files. Editing and dark room work can be redone easily. I don't bother storing that stuff. Its like the old dark room days. I keep the negatives. I can reproduce the final prints with all the primping and fussing if I have to, so I don't bother with them. Only the negatives are necessary. (Note I have NEVER gone back to those DVDs. My smugmug images get downloaded, printed, etc quite often but my DVD backup of "negatives" never gets touched.)

I wish there was a fast way of doing it but haven't found it yet. I upload the photos to my pc from the camera card and do all the crop/resize (typically resize to 800 x 600 or 640 x 480) and naming and save them to a folder I call My First Daylily Blooms 2010 (have to admit all blooms whether first or last go in there). If I have another photo for the same daylily already in the folder, I just add a 1, 2, 3 etc to the name so I don't get the "replace" question. I've also noticed that when I go to save a photo with a name, the program will bring up a box which shows which ones are already in the folder. I, like you, then delete all the files I've loaded from my camera that are no longer needed. I don't worry about dating the photo as I've learned that when I mouse over a photo when viewing the DL folder on my pc in thumbnails it gives me the date, size and time the photo was taken. I have 3 picture programs I can use. Microsoft Picture (very basic), FastStone Image Viewer and Resizer (freebies and the ones I use the most),Picasa 3 (basic also). I don't delete my hard drive files from my pc when I upload to Photobucket. And I've found that sometimes Photobucket gets a bit quirky and I don't want to lose everything. I also backup my picture files on a memory stick. I have Plantstep software which keeps track of all the daylilies and any other plant I wish to track. This I will update in the fall when things calm down. I did at one time have just everything on spreadsheets but finally got too many to keep doing it that way. I also can track crosses I do or seeds I buy. It is a very useful program. When I upload to Photobucket, I don't resize or crop but just have to title the photo again. I wish Photobucket would just ask if you want to use the file name for the title and then be able to save to whatever photobucket folder you want. Post when you can and don't stress it. Some days I'm so far behind and then start catching up when I have some downtime. Julia

HI ALL, Paula, I got your package, thank you, it was a five minute task! Treasea, I opened your package and all of your seeds are in there loose with no names so I'll treat them as extras and toss one into each envy until they are gone. I wish photobucket wasn't having issues, I'd love to post a pic of the extras that have been sent in. I'm waiting to get all the envies in before I begin the drop one in each until all the extras are gone. Lisa

My mom saved a ton of stuff when I was in elementary. Then her filing cabinet got full and she weeded it down with my help (I was maybe middle school age). So now I have maybe an inch-high stack of school papers/art projects, and I think that's more than plenty. (I also have my old yearbooks, pictures etc, but I don't think they fall into a "stuff to be weeded" pile.) As for your questions: "First, should I merge all of these mini-piles into one room?" I wouldn't. I can't ever manage to sit down and go through a mountain of papers. I'd rather grab one mini-pile, sort through it, and then put it away. "Do I go through these piles/papers first and divide them into two (one pertaining to each child?) " I would think that it should be divided by child so that they can easily be passed on to them years from now. "Or, as I handle each paper, do I decide "School" vs "Non-School" and then break it down to each child? " No. Why would you? Are you going to store it seperately? Ideally, you'd have only the most important keepsakes and there wouldn't be many so it'd be easy to go through later and find all "nonschool" stuff if need be. "Or, do I decide "Keep" or "Toss" as I go through these piles? And if I do it this way, does the "Keep" pile get sorted?" Just Keep or Toss for now. If it really bugs you later, you can always sort it later. "I'm thinking that then I will separate each kid's stuff into the elementary school years, the middle school years, and then the high school years. ...Should I create folders for each grade and then put school and non-school items in those folders? " Wow, it sounds like you're keeping a lot more than one sample per year!! Even if there's say 3 papers with with "thoughtful comments" on it, that's a maximum of 24 pieces of paper for all of elementary school! I just think you're making an overly complex system. Go through the piles, pick out the best stuff. Write the child's name and grade on each piece of paper if it's not on there already. Stick it in a box, label the box, and call it done! The benefits of a simple system are: 1) Better chance of actually doing it 2) if you really really feel the urge to subdivide the keepsakes by year, it can be easily done. But honestly I think that if you need to do that then you've kept too much.