One of Stacy's optional extra's are Cold Storage Photo Boxes. She removes photos that have remained unscrapped for years into boxes for long term storage without bogging down her storage binders or her category drawers.

In a digital world I comtemplated the necessity of doing this when I could simply filter out the less worthy photos by rating them lower or sorting by date. However, I figured if you had 1000s of photos that fell into this category you might want to archive them off of your hard drive to save space. So here is my plan for doing this.

In Photoshop Elements 6 there is an option to archive photos to CD. Simply select the photos you want to archive then use this feature. The photos are moved to the CD/DVD and removed from the hard drive. Elements keeps a thumbnail of the image and marks this image with a flag that indicates you need to retrieve the CD to edit/print the full size image.

When doing this I will archive one year at a time and create a CD/DVD label that has the year but also opens to show a bulleted list of events/themes of whatever is on the disc.


Photo Credit: Taken from "The Organized and Inspired Scrapbooker" - Wendy Smedley & Abbey Garvey

The advantage to doing this in Elements is simply to keep the thumbnails and still be able to search for a file. Bridge and Lightroom both give you the ability to export files and you can simply copy them to the CD/DVD. Lightroom will continue to reference the original location in its catalog and display thumbnails. However, if you try to use a photo it will tell you that the photo is missing from the referenced location and prompt you for a new location at which point you can tell it to look on the CD/DVD you used.