20th Wedding Anniversary Meets My 3rd KonMari Festival
This February marked my 20th wedding anniversary. And as February blew in, I was faced with the knowledge that I had not yet tackled sorting, selecting, and albumizing my wedding photos. From 20 years ago.
Assessing the Mess
All those years ago, my husband and I had two wedding ceremonies and two wedding receptions. The first was a tiny civil ceremony and reception followed two years later by a church wedding and reception.
We had informal photographs and formal professional photographs.
We had 3x5 photos, 4x6 photos, 5x5 photos, color photos, and black and white photos. And all the negatives.
Piles and piles of photos.
To make things yet more complicated, I was only partially complete with family photos—20 years worth. And this mess was in spite of having kept fairly on top of family photos over the years and having KonMari’d my way through those family photos during the Photo category twice.
Third Time’s the Charm?
I am a KonMari graduate (of sorts). It was going to be this year or never!
The process itself took almost three weeks of my wedding and family photos taking over the kitchen table. This includes a lot of procrastination time, but I decided to not move the mess off of the kitchen table until I was complete.
It also includes delays of having to mail order new posts for my wedding themed post-bound albums, twice. Because I ordered the wrong posts the first time.
Actual hands-on time handling and sorting photos (wedding and leftover family photos) was somewhere in the 15 hour range.
The Madness to the Method
My process specifically for my wedding photos:
*Organize wedding photos into discrete sub-events. Before the ceremony. Ceremony. After ceremony. The cake. The food. The dancing. Etc.
*Eliminate all the ugly or awkward photos.
*Rank photos within each discrete sub-event: “favorite” photos, “good” photos, and “acceptable” photos.
*Start putting photos into albums by sub-event using only the “favorites” and drawing upon “good/acceptable” only as needed to create a narrative.
*Step back and see how it feels to view each album.
Assessing the Mess
All those years ago, my husband and I had two wedding ceremonies and two wedding receptions. The first was a tiny civil ceremony and reception followed two years later by a church wedding and reception.
We had informal photographs and formal professional photographs.
We had 3x5 photos, 4x6 photos, 5x5 photos, color photos, and black and white photos. And all the negatives.
Piles and piles of photos.
To make things yet more complicated, I was only partially complete with family photos—20 years worth. And this mess was in spite of having kept fairly on top of family photos over the years and having KonMari’d my way through those family photos during the Photo category twice.
Third Time’s the Charm?
I am a KonMari graduate (of sorts). It was going to be this year or never!
The process itself took almost three weeks of my wedding and family photos taking over the kitchen table. This includes a lot of procrastination time, but I decided to not move the mess off of the kitchen table until I was complete.
It also includes delays of having to mail order new posts for my wedding themed post-bound albums, twice. Because I ordered the wrong posts the first time.
Actual hands-on time handling and sorting photos (wedding and leftover family photos) was somewhere in the 15 hour range.
The Madness to the Method
My process specifically for my wedding photos:
*Organize wedding photos into discrete sub-events. Before the ceremony. Ceremony. After ceremony. The cake. The food. The dancing. Etc.
*Eliminate all the ugly or awkward photos.
*Rank photos within each discrete sub-event: “favorite” photos, “good” photos, and “acceptable” photos.
*Start putting photos into albums by sub-event using only the “favorites” and drawing upon “good/acceptable” only as needed to create a narrative.
*Step back and see how it feels to view each album.
After all the hours preparatory work, the editing and swapping photos within the albums themselves only took a short session before I felt settled. I had created two albums—one for each wedding + reception—using the wedding themed albums I had bought 18 years ago!
Overall, I kept and albumized perhaps 1/3 of the original photos. The other 2 /3 of the wedding photos were stacked into discard piles. However, I decided to sleep on it before shredding.
The next morning I felt a little panicked at the idea of shredding 2 /3 of the remaining photos even though I was aware they were bad shots, repetitive shots, uninspiring shots, etc.
I revisited the discard pile and discovered the decisions I made were good. However, to appease my panic, I selected twenty photos to save from the discard pile. And even then, of those twenty late-saves, only ten were put into the albums.
Done. 20 years later.
The best part? Sharing the end results with my husband who had not viewed most of these photos in 18 – 20 years and seeing the pleasure on his face as he relived all our wonderful memories.
Lessons Learned and Shared
If you have a category that is massive, or massively abandoned and messy, don’t discount doing the best you can on that category during a KonMari festival.
Each previous time I worked through the Photos category I made major progress and I was able to build on those previous successes. The fact that my “family” photos were almost complete because of KonMari festivals #1 and #2 meant I could actually “see” and cope with wedding photos during festival #3.
Progress, not perfection
I almost halted the entire process because of second guessing myself. I felt like I didn’t have the right kind of wedding photo albums, or maybe I needed to take my 3x5s and have them developed into larger sizes, and all sorts of other “need to do this perfect and right” conversations in my head.
In the end, I used the albums I bought 18 years ago and used 3x5s because the added time and expense of getting it all glitzy and perfect did not add joy for me. I actually still really liked the original white-silver-gold album covers and the many 3x5s mixed in just fine with my 4x6s and 5x5s.
Living Now
I underestimated how lovely it feels to finish an old “someday” project that was hanging around for 20 years. Marie Kondo teaches to not hang onto someday projects because as humans we almost never get to them. But if it really matters, just make it happen. Now. Today.
My wedding albums was a “10 out of 10” someday project that was left hanging. I am learning to let go of any someday project that isn’t top tier spark joy. And to move with purpose with those that truly matter.
What is your “10 out of 10” someday project? Find it and do it now!
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