In Fun with Genealogy Files Part 3, I shared my obsessive need desire to create virtual place holders. Ones that match the paper file place holders I made for each of my direct line ancestors.

You’ll be pleased to know that I have been plodding along, methodically moving documents into their respective folders. It isn’t fun, but somebody has to do it. And until I win the lottery, I have no hope of hiring anyone to do it for me.

In the meantime, I have been working on upcoming blog posts. Which require photographic accompaniment. And that, dear readers, has been a bit of a nightmare.

Not that I don’t have pictures. I have plenty of pictures.

And plenty of digital images and lots of scans of perfectly lovely pictures.

But finding a specific photograph or digital image in my collection wasn’t easy.

In fact, it was downright hard.

My every-once-in-awhile scanning sessions resulted in folders full of non-related pictures. I tried to arrange them chronologically but I didn’t always know the date on which the picture was taken. And there were so many pictures!

Every time I opened a folder I would cringe. It took crazy amounts of time to find the specific picture I sought. Most of the time I would settle on a different picture because the search was so frustrating.

Then one day I had an epiphany. I could sort the photos by name. By name! Can you hear the picture fairies singing?

I created folders for myself and my husband, our parents, siblings, children, grandchildren, animal companions. I gave place names to folders that would contain pictures from our gardens or home improvements or vacation spots.

When pictures contained more than one subject I would simply right-click, copy and paste into each additional subject’s folder.

In one weekend I sorted 992 photographs.

There are thousands more to sort. And of course I’ll have to edit them and probably rename them. But that’s okay.

Because I no longer cringe when I open a folder of pictures.

I smile at the memories.