Welcome to the ScanMyPhotos Journal. Today we share “How to Declutter Your Space & Memories by Digitizing Family Nostalgia.”

If you’ve discovered this article, you probably don’t need much encouragement to declutter your home. But in case you do, consider this:

• Less clutter makes your home more spacious and liveable.
• Less clutter makes your home look expensive because it’s easier to stay organized.
• Disorganization costs money.
• Less clutter makes your home more beautiful because you can use the space for decoration instead of storage.
• Less clutter makes your home safer because there are fewer things to trip over and wider spaces to move in.

Bottom line: It’s good to declutter. The trouble is dealing with nostalgic items, like photos, term papers, graduation certificates, and Christmas cards. You don’t need these things in your daily life, but you don’t want them entirely out of your life, either.

Digitizing your nostalgic keepsakes is one of the best modern solutions to this dilemma. Let’s talk about how to do it.

Digitizing Nostalgia & Uncluttering Your Space 101

The first step in digitizing your nostalgia is to triage your stuff. Find a place to put all the things you want to keep but don’t have space for, and divide it into three piles:

• Easy Items: Flat objects no larger than a piece of letter paper, for which you don’t need the original if you can be confident of a safe digital solution.
• Harder Items: Flat objects for which you need the original; larger flat objects whether or not you need the original; anything bound in a book.
• Odds and Ends: Objects you would like to digitize but don’t know how because they aren’t flat or are inappropriate for storage.

You can do this for all the keepsakes in your home at once or go room by room. Once you have your initial batch of triaged items, deal with each pile one by one.

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