Category Drawer Re-Organization

After completing the re-organization of my Library of Memories albums last month, I began working on re-organizing another one of the essentials in my LOM system - Category Drawers. These drawers hold printed photos by categories, beginning with the five main categories in my system (Robbie & Melissa, Family & Friends, Days We Celebrate, Places We've Been, Things That Matter) and sub-categories and sections within each. Here's a look at my newly re-organized drawers.

The purpose of these Category Drawers is to take a small percentage of your best photos and store them out of chronological order. This system makes it easy to find a photo of a certain person or for a particular topic when I'm scrapping a story that doesn't really have a specific photo with it. However, the main purpose of this type of organization is to allow these photos to "age" and then thumb through and find "connections" among similar photos.

I wasn't really thinking about creating any connections layouts when I started working on these drawers; my main goal was to get them organized and set up sub-categories for the sections where I had just been putting photos behind the main tab. However, I was totally inspired by the connections I noticed and just had to stop and create two fun layouts.

As I was thumbing through the photos of me, I noticed several photos of me standing beside a horse. I laughed out loud when I realized I have almost the same expression on my face in each one, even though they were taken in three different years AND three different countries!

Journaling reads: It's obvious from these photos that I have never spent much time around horses, but I never miss a great photo op, whether it's right here in Texas or among the Canadian Rockies or on the streets of London, England.

For this next layout, I  had already started collecting some square punched photos of Robbie with his eyes closed, and as I was thumbing through the photos of him in the Category Drawers, I just had to pull out a few more to create this fun layout that really doesn't need any journaling to go along with the title.  (These photos were taken over a span of 8 years.)
 

I'm excited to have another one of my LOM essentials re-organized and am now moving on to re-organizing/ decluttering/purging/triaging the photos in my Storage Binders.

  

How about you, do you scrap photos from different years together? Have you found any connections in your photos lately?