Welcome back to live with Mollie, where we dive into the art and heart of organizing your family memories. This is such a wonderful time for us to be together. I am so motivated to get out and spread the word about the importance of saving family photos. Today it is Monday, May 19th and we are doing the live with Mollie now at 2:00 on Mondays.
On YouTube and if you are catching this on the recording, you can mark your calendars for Mondays at 2 p.m. central time. Today's topic is one that near and dear to my heart. It's saving that one photo and remembering that one photo and knowing that you have it and you can find it. Sometimes people have, you know, gone through their pictures and they don't find that one picture.
And it can be so frustrating. So today we're going to dive into that a little bit more. And it's going to really remind you of why photos matter so much. So in this episode I'm going to share some personal stories from my own life as well as a couple client situations. And then I'm going to talk about practical tips to help you organize your photos.
So you never lose those memories again. Now, I would love to hear from you. You can say hello in the comments if you like, and you can post that picture that is so important to you, and maybe a photo you can't find. Or maybe it's the photo that you never took. That's a thing as well. I also will answer questions that you might have about your photos, and you can throw those in the comments and we'll get to those at the end of the program.
All right. I just would like to tell you a little bit about the important photos that I wish I had taken. And I wonder if this has happened to you too, when you look back over life. Was there a moment you wish you'd had your camera and snap that picture? Well, it did happen to me twice that that I can think of.
These are moments really vivid in my mind, and I can picture them also, in my mind, but not necessarily hold the photo in my hand. The first moment takes me back to August of 2004. My father in law was, retired and he was enjoying retirement along with my mother in law. We were traveling the country and building churches for, organization called laborers for Christ.
However, he was stricken with lung cancer, the kind that occurs from the work situation when you are in exposed to asbestos. So it was a horrible diagnosis. And, we, you know, really observed how important his faith was in that process. But even more impactful for my father in law during the last weeks of his life was my daughter.
She was three years old, and boy, she was just so full of energy. And, she would get over to my in-laws condo and crawl up on that hospital bed and spend time with my father in law. He loved it. We we know he was suffering, you know, with the pain of the cancer. But to have her in his arms, spending the time with him was truly priceless.
And I'm really fortunate that we have photos of those moments. So it's not these pictures that I wish I had. It's the photos. A few weeks later that I wish I had taken. My father in law's funeral was it was a somber affair. He was, you know, in his early 70s. He had so much more to do in life.
And many people traveled from afar to visit and mourn with us. My daughter was the only young child at that funeral, and she delighted people. She looked adorable in this dress. It was a black sweater top with a plaid skirt. She had the tights and shiny shoes and she was chattering with everybody. And they really enjoyed her energy and you know, the life and knowing how much she meant to my father in law, it was really special.
And as I watched her, you know, interacting with people, I thought, I really wish I had my camera here to snap a picture of her. It was so meaningful to see how, she delighted people. And I don't have a picture. It was 2004. We didn't bring smartphones like that to funerals, and my digital camera was sitting at home.
So all I have is this image in my mind that slowly fades. You know, more each day. And I wish I had a photo of that moment. It's, it's just something that I think, you know, as we are now into this digital age, we don't worry about as much because we always have our phones with us to take pictures.
So unfortunately, the second photo I wish I had, I wish I had had taken was two years later. Still, when we weren't carrying cell phones around, snapping pictures of everything I had just had. My second kid, Alex, was, in our arms in the recovery room at the hospital, and the first people to walk in that door was my mother and sister, and they enjoyed meeting Alex, holding him for the first time.
And I was like, recovering. It didn't even occur to me to say, oh, get a photo of that. And nobody thought to take a picture of them with Alex, and, and I don't have a photo of that moment, and it's okay. Fortunately, a few hours later, my mother in law visited, and she, had a photo taken of her with my daughter and Alex.
So be meeting Alex for the first time. I have that moment. But I'm always going to wish that I had a picture of him with my family, my my mom and my sister. Sometimes we take too many photos today, but back then, I would have loved to have had a handful of pictures from from that moment. And when you think about, you know, photos that weren't taken, it does make you appreciate the photos you did take.
And I remember this is going back a few years earlier to around 1991 or 1992. My husband was my boyfriend at that time, and we had traveled up north to my parents cottage, and our family dog, Gypsy, was along with us. My husband, my boyfriend at the time, we loved Gypsy. He had never had pets growing up and he really enjoyed spending time with that dog.
I took a photo of him with Gypsy, was kind of late at night, and it was just wonderful because Gypsy was getting attention. Paul just looked young and handsome. It was a great picture and I held on to it for quite a few years. But then in 2007, I began scrapbooking. And scrapbooking, you know, involves cutting pictures up.
I actually was invited to a scrapbooking party, my first one, and they encouraged us to bring our favorite pictures to make a project. So I took that picture of Paul and Gypsy, and I cut it into an oval, and I pasted it onto a piece of cardstock. It's like a crime in my mind to take a photo and cut it up if it's the only original, but I didn't know any better back then.
Doesn't matter, because that project with the picture of him and my other favorite photos I brought, I lost it somewhere in my scrapbook years. I put that piece of cardstock with that photo somewhere safe and I could never find it again. I'm betting some of you have had those safe places that you never found again, either. Well, when we started Pixologie in 2013, I really did take a hard look and searched through everything to see if I could find that one photo and I couldn't.
I figured it was gone forever, and I was. I was kind of sad because we've had Labrador Retriever, you know, since we were married. And I'd love to have a photo of him with Gypsy back then. Along with the labs we've had through the years. But it wasn't meant to be, or so it seemed. This year, just two months ago, 2025, I had a little stroke of luck.
My mom is still living at home and she's getting into her late 70s, and I thought it would be a really good idea to, lower her bed so she could get in and out of it easier. And when my husband and son lifted up the mattress, sure enough, in between the mattress and the box, spring was a poster board full of pictures, and I was like, wow!
It was the board of photos that we had at our wedding reception, so it had pictures of Paul as a young kid, me as a young kid, our dating years, and I was like, what is that doing in their bed, mom? And she said, well, your dad and I thought it would be a safe place for for it.
And it really was safe. It was in great condition as I picked it up and carried it out to the car. I realized that my favorite photo of Paul and Gypsy were right on it, and I couldn't believe it. When I got that photo, I took it off the board and I scanned it right away and, you know, a lot of other people probably wouldn't think it's the best photo, but to me it was priceless.
And I'm betting you have had a photo that's missing that you would like to find and you need to know. There's a lot of us in that same situation where we're frustrated because we can't find that one photo. One of my clients is going through this right now. She is looking for pictures of her family at an alligator farm, and I.
I jumped in to help because we originally organized her print pictures I like three years ago. She had given us boxes and bins of loose photos and, albums of photos, and we organize them by year, chronological, and we scan them and uploaded them to forever. We also downloaded all of her photos from Shutterfly, because that's where her main storage of her pictures was from, like the early 2000s to around 2016.
So we downloaded those photos and we also collected all of her digital pictures on her phone. All of that was consolidated and organized into year albums in her Forever Permanent Storage account. So everything was up there. There's 20,000 images, and she and her daughter were looking for pictures from this Florida trip in 2015. During that trip, they'd gone to an alligator farm and they had photos they vividly could remember of them holding these baby alligators.
And they they couldn't find them in her Forever account. And they wondered if I had any clues. So I dove in, of course, and I checked the nearby years to see if, you know, they were misfiled. Or maybe they were in the undated photos and there was nothing. So of course, the next step is to scroll through her forever.
Gallery. All 19,980 or so images. I scrolled through all of them. It really didn't take long. Maybe a half an hour. And I had a clear idea of what I was looking for. Alligators. But I could not find any alligators, so that was a disappointment for sure. But I did find a clue. In 2018, my client had taken pictures of a particular photo album.
In fact, she had opened the photo album and she took pictures of the pictures in that photo album. And it was one of those albums that had notes on the side where you could write in, and I could see these pictures, and they were dated 2012 and 2013. And I thought, well, let me make sure that we have these pictures.
And so I went to her 2012 and 2013 albums and those photos we had not organized or scanned and uploaded into her account. They weren't in those years. So I did the next thing and I went back to our project pictures. When we organize photos, we always take pictures of the steps that we do. So when we get the first batch of bins and boxes and all of that, we do a first sort in inventory, and we take photos of the different batches of pictures.
So that first sorting and inventory we just sorted by decade. And I could see in the 20 tens we didn't really have much at all. That album that she photographed was not in the original work that that we did for her. So I'm hoping and I emailed this to her. I emailed her and I said, you know, we don't think we have that album you photographed in 2018.
So hopefully the album is hidden in a closet and those alligator pictures are going to be found because I know what it's like when you can really remember looking at the pictures and the the only photos that she had from that trip. There were two of them, and it was a group photos of the family in front of the hotel.
But this is what organizing does. When you've been through your pictures and you you've kind of got them categorized by the years, you know, or events or vacations all of a sudden you realize what you have and what you might be missing. Now, she didn't realize it for a few years, but at least you've got a structure that you can go back to and and start thinking about how to solve the mystery.
And I'm hoping that she's going to let me know that she found those photo albums. And, you know, when you think about people in their pictures, everybody has kind of a different relationship with their photos. Some people look at them routinely and often, others it could be a few years like this family, you know, finally going back to a trip that was a decade ago.
One person I met, John, he was he was talking to me about, being in Florida recently. He went to the Florida Keys and he went to the end of the Florida Keys like the southernmost point. I guess this is a photo opportunity for people. Or you get a photo by the southernmost point and it's a like a boogie and it's colorful.
He was there, you know, a few weeks prior to us talking. And he said, you know, I was sitting there next to that boy and I thought I was here back in the early 1980s. I know there was a photo of me standing here. I wonder where it is. And, we actually talked about, you know, maybe he should start getting his photos in order so that he could maybe find this picture.
And I don't know if he actually took any steps towards it, but he did agree that it was important to do the thing. Is, life kind of, you know, gets in the way. And our photo organizing projects take a back burner. And I'm here to just tell you that we want to get on it now so that we can enjoy these pictures while we're still able, and so that we could, you know, share a photo from the 1980s with someone who just went to the Florida Keys and was at that point.
It's so much fun when you can bring these pictures up with a few touches on your phone. And, one thing I thought was really funny about, talking with John is he's missing this photo of him, and it's really probably not technically missing yet because he hasn't started looking for it. So it might be in there, but I call it a missing photo since he can't put his hands on it right away.
So he has a missing photo. And then I said, all right, John, you were there again. Did you get a photo of you now next to that boy? And he said, no. Now I consider that a missed photo opportunity, something I'd regret later, but I don't think John cared that much. And that's okay, because we all have, like I said, different relationships with the pictures and the memories that we want to remember.
And, he was just kind of a fun conversation. I don't know if he has, tackle this pictures, but, I hope he does because the the photos are important. But what's even more important now is the opportunities that we have to share them with other people. And those opportunities can slide away before we know it. So how do you avoid losing that one photo or ensuring that you can find it?
I have three practical tips to start organizing your photos today. First, you gather everything to one place. If it's your physical print pictures, you're going to get the boxes and bins and albums and get them to one place. If you have digital photos on your phone or you know your computer or external hard drives, you're going to corral them.
We want to corral all of our memories, all right. For print pictures, you're going to put them on a table, gather them all there. Maybe you have to put some of the bins under the table, but gather it together. And for digital pictures, you can have two folders on your computer. One is the Photos to organize folder and the other is your master folder.
We call it your photo estate folder. All right. And you can work on getting all of your digital pictures into the Photos to Organize folder. This step can feel overwhelming bringing it all together. It might take you a few weeks to do that, but it's really important so that you can see the scope of your project, and it's the foundation for the next step, which is to sort by time or theme.
I like to sort by time chronologically. So for physical photos, we are going to organize, by decades and years or events like weddings and vacations and your digital pictures. We will use your file manager on your computer. That's what we teach. Or you could use Forever Permanent Storage, which is a great way to organize pictures. And you can sort your photos by date automatically and create albums for the different events that you have.
If you're working with a lot of images and you've got them up there, you can then use facial recognition and tagging to do more identification for your photos so that when you're looking for your alligator pictures and you type in alligator, they show up. If you've got them. All right. So that second step is to sort and organize them.
The third is to preserve and back them up. So for print pictures, they'll be scanned and then saved to that photo estate folder or your master folder, whatever you want to call it. And then your digital pictures will be in your photo estate or master family folder. So you've got them in one location on your computer. Then you back it up to an external hard drive and upload it to, cloud storage.
Like I said, we recommend forever, but there's others out there, and then you can easily share your photos and bring them up when you have a special moment that you can reflect back and share with the people you're with. Now, sometimes you do have to scroll through all of them like I did for our client. And and that takes a little bit of time.
But the nice thing is everything is in one place, which is like 90% of the battle with your pictures. So if it sounds overwhelming, don't, you know, don't think big. Although I want you to collect everything to one place, start small with one box or one year's worth of your phone photos. The key is progress, not perfection. You'll be amazed at what you rediscover and you'll sleep better knowing the memories are safe.
I think that's one thing that we hear a lot of, is how relieved people are to have something with their pictures be done. So I've talked a little bit about these special photos. The ones that were missing, the ones with wish to be taken. Now I'd like to hear from you. Do you have that one photo or, a picture that you're desperate to find?
Oh. Karen is pointing out that she's still looking for photos of the Indian room at the Allen County Museum in Lima, Ohio that she thought she took. Oh. Thank you. Sure. Thank you, Karen, for sharing that. Because, it's funny when you can just remember it in your mind, so, so vividly and then you can't find it.
So I'm rooting for you that these pictures will show up. And, and I don't know if anyone else has any thoughts out there about pictures, but, the, idea is that you know what you're missing. And I did see, another comment from Karen there, and I like this. This is a really good idea for photos you didn't take.
Sometimes you can find a picture online that reminds you of the photo you didn't take. She did this with a drum set that her son had, but she never took a picture of him with it. It's funny that you mention that, Karen, because, one thought, here's another photo that I'm really sorry I did not take a picture of.
Or not a photo. I didn't take a picture of the situation. Is this my husband was able to get a commercial in, like the third year we were married. He had a Camaro. Is this cool black car with the T tops? I would say that was around 2007 or 8. Hannah was little and I never took a photo of him with that car.
We have no pictures of that Camaro. I think I'm going to have to go get a photo and somehow add that to to our collection because, it really was an important part of our lives, especially now that our son wants one. So thanks for sharing that. Here's this isn't, a comment about a photo that someone has.
We had this posted on our YouTube channel. It's a good question. They asked, what about your hidden folder? I have some photos in the hidden folder. I don't want to see myself, but I'm holding them for my son. So I believe this person asked that question because they have an iPhone. I'm not 100% sure if you can do this on an Android phone, but on an iPhone you can hide pictures.
I usually hide the pictures and I definitely don't want anyone else to see. And I'm they're pictures of like health situations, especially with my mom. And I hide those because we wouldn't want that. But this woman is hiding pictures that she wants to keep for her son, but that she doesn't want to see. I'm suspecting that the situation is maybe she's had a divorce, or she's no longer with her son's father and she wants her son to have those pictures.
Well, it would be difficult to see photos on your phone of, you know, your ex, right? And hiding them is is a is an okay idea. I almost think that you could copy those photos to a folder on your computer so that you can delete them off your phone and they're out of your possession. You'd have them in a folder on your computer, and maybe you back them up to a Dropbox folder, or Google Drive folder, and then save that link.
Save that folder on your computer for when it's time to give them to your son. I think it's really I, you know, when you have a divorce situation, it's it's hard to have the those photos of, you know, the happy days when you're no longer together. And I, I would almost say that it would be better to just get them out of your photo collection that's on your phone.
And saved somewhere else so that you don't have to hide them and potentially, you know, forget that you have them. So that's my answer to the, question about, hidden photos. So if you didn't know that on your iPhone, you can definitely, hide photos. You just hold the photo down and then your options will come up and you can hide the photo.
That was that was a good question. I thought it'd be interesting for you guys to hear. All right. If we don't have any other questions, then I will look to start wrapping our program up for today. I really enjoy talking with people about their photos and helping figure out those mysteries. When we are organizing photos and we know there are some missing, it's really fun to see the collection start coming together, consolidating, and you're bringing groups of pictures back together.
And I'm really hopeful that our client is going to find those family, photos at the alligator farm. All right, you guys, thank you so much for joining. And, I wish you a great week. I hope you delete some pictures you don't need off your phone, and you save some of those that you definitely want to share and pass on to the next generation.
We'll see.
