We spent the majority of our day outside yesterday, and I made a point to carry around my nice camera instead of relying on my iphone for EVERY PHOTO I TAKE.
I’m hesitant to admit this… but I haven’t printed a single picture of the girls since their 1-year photo books. I was planning to make a photo book for each girl every year. But then time got away from me last summer. And then I started to talk myself into doing ONE family photo book. I’m just not the scrapbooking type. But I AM the memory-making/sentimental type. So something needs to be done!
I have thousands of pictures that need to be gone through and either printed, or made into photo books. It’s gotten to the point where the very idea of it is overwhelming. But in the back of my mind, I know it’s only going to compound. They’re only TWO and I’m this overcome with anxiety over pictures?
I think I need to set aside AN ENTIRE WEEKEND to devote to going through files and files of pictures and getting them printed. Somebody needs to threaten me.
LUCKILY we have all our pics/files backed up online with Cabonite. That gives me peace of mind. But still…
What is your system for printing family photos? Are you a photo book fanatic? Do you like individual hard copies of pictures? Are you a devoted scrap-booker? Do you have millions of photos on your computer (or phone) that you beat yourself up about not printing? Please tell me I’m not alone!
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You are definitely not alone. I am 50 years old with grandkids and have a clothes basket full of photos that I have planned on sorting through for two years!! Pictures back before the digital age!! I did go through and throw a lot out….doubles and zoo pics of animals and pics that didn’t turn out!!LOL It is very daunting to say the least! I love your blog and have followed you for two years. You have a beautiful family!
I’m starting to have the same problem. If you find a solution or have a brilliant idea, lemme know! haha, Because I know I need to do something with the millions of adorable pictures I have of Ev.
I am a traditional scrapper but I have seen many non-scrappers get a lot done with Becky Higgins’ Project Life products. I definitely think you would rock it!! http://beckyhiggins.com/
I have recently started using Shutterfly, and i love it. I do one album for each year. Doing one per kid is just too much, and printing them out is expensive, plus then there is buying books, and taking the time to put them in. I just made one that was 73 pages for 2013 – had more than usual because we had a baby. The best part is that you can make some of the pictures really small, so you can fit 20 or more on one page depending on how you format. Every March they send me a coupon for 29.99 off the price, plus they were 30% off, and had free shipping. So, my 73 page book ended up being $50 something. Not super cheap, but MUCH cheaper than printing 700 pictures, albums, plus all the room those albums take up. I highly recommend them. And then they store your pictures forever, and there are tons of ways to embellish it. And i believe you can email your finished book to who ever you want to share your hard work. It takes time, i’m not going to lie, but once they are all downloaded there, you can just work on it an hour at a time or whatever. i have vowed to do one every year, because i have a stack of pictures from my first baby still sitting in a pile. 🙁
We set our computer to automatically name photos by the date taken, and then upload them into quarterly folders for each year. They’re saved on our hard drive and a separate back-up. I occasionally make photo books for special trips or for gifts, but that’s it. Why do you feel like you have to do more? If my family wants to look at pictures, we sit by the computer and click through them (or in the family room on the Apple TV.) I’m totally content with our system. Photos and memories speak for themselves – you don’t need to dress them up!
I’m the same way… I’m bad about it I have 1000s of pictures just waiting to be used for something other than birthday party decor… I want to use Project Life stuff but haven’t gotten any yet. Have you seen it? Amazon is where I look at it all. Easy scrapbooking it looks right up my alley 😉 because really I don’t have time for real scrapbooking!
I have it all. I make it a point to upload my pictures to Snapfish and each month or so when they do a big print sale, I order prints of the good ones and they just get cataloged in a photo box until I’m ready to do something with them.
Each of my kids have a baby book for their first year (which I admit I’ve had to make up some milestones because I’m always behind) and we have a family photo album. I do it as a scrapbook, but that’s just because it’s fun for me to do. Again, though, I’m a year behind on the family scrapbook part.
Oh, you are not alone. I think I have close to 100GB of photos (and I don’t even have children yet!) on a backup drive at home and most of them are not in albums. I keep thinking I need to make albums but I’m at the computer 40 hours a week for work and once I’m done with that I don’t like to spend extra time on the computer.
Go to living social.com and buy a voucher for a photo book!! Then go to the photo website and it makes the book for you!! I know shutterfly always saves your projects which is awesome incase something happens to your book you could reprint it!!!
I love scrap booking!!! Just finished my 6 year olds 8th book and I’m still a book and a half behind! Her 1st 3 books are actual scrapbooks but then I switched to Shutterfly books! 1 for each year plus I write a letter to her in the front and she answers questionnaire questions at the end of each book like favorite food, color ect ! My 2 year old only has 1 shutterfly book from her first 17 days of life in the NICU! My goal is to get both of them caught up by the time #3 arrives in Nov!! My daughters love looking through their books and time goes by so fast that I know these memories will now last them a lifetime! So worth it!!
Long time reader, first time comment! I spent all of Christmas break last year going through every single photo (digital) and organized by year and only kept the really great ones(it was very hard). I am now working my way through each year (from when my husband and I got engaged) and making Shutterfly books. Each month gets a page, some more important memories get two pages. (The standard books have 20-25 pages.) I especially love their options with 9-15 pictures on one page so that I can put all those extra photos that didn’t need an entire page but were still necessary. It took an entire week to organize mine, so good luck! My daughter is 2 also and I still haven’t figured out how to manage hers because I keep them separate!
I print out a family yearbook through MyPublisher every year, and I even have a few pages of Instagram photos in the back as well. The front and back covers are always a photo taken professionally through our photographer, so that they look perfect! I also do vacation scrapbooks through Project Life, so that I can write about the adventures, etc instead of letting the pictures do the talking.
As for printing I typically print out professional photos for the big ones on the walls (family session in the living room, my son’s superhero session in his room, my daughter’s newborn pictures still up in her room even though she’s 2- oops!), and then the smaller frames scattered on bookshelves, etc are my favorite snapshots or Instagram photos. I’m pretty happy with my system thus far!
Your photos are beautiful! I need to have a better system for saving my photos. Husband is going to help me with a external hard drive. I don’t usually print them but probably should so I can enjoy them outside of my computer.
I write my blog as a family journal. Since I use it as my journal I print it off each year through blurb.com. It’s really simple to do and you can choose from your posts which ones you want included in your book. Then you can go through and edit whatever pages you need to so it’s looking like you want. It is time consuming, but I love them and know my kids will love looking through them when they’re older. As for my girl’s personal pictures. I did a book for them after they each turned one. I haven’t done any more for them after that, but I do like the idea of doing one each year. I also have a journal for each of them that I started writing to them in the day I found out I was pregnant with each of them. I write in it every once in a while and add pictures. It’s something I hope they will really enjoy reading and will appreciate. I don’t know when I’m going to give it to them.
a few years ago i found shutterfly.com for online scrapbooking and i have never looked back! it is so much easier to upload the pictures to the site and making the scrapbook there rather than buying tons of paper / books / stickers. sadly i am a few years behind (and i don’t even have kids yet… hopefully soon!) but i’m slowly getting caught up!
I used to stress over this, too. In the change to the digital photo world, things weren’t ever making it into real life pictures in frames and albums. After a massive organization project one weekend, I got all of our pictures into files by year. I title the files by month, and event: 2011/April – Scott’s Birthday! 2013/July – Summer Vacation!
When I have that really great picture that needs to be framed, I print it out by ordering it online from our local drug store as I’m filing photos into their folders. Pictures make it into frames now! We also use that method for printing pictures for Christmas cards.
For the rest, we do an annual photo book from one of those popular online publishers. It’s so easy now that everything is in its folder… I dedicate pages to certain events each year: holidays, birthdays, family trips, school achievements, etc and it takes about an hour to get the order in. I order right after New Year’s, and then we get a nice family Valentine’s gift every year when the book arrives.
Finally, photos in frames and albums! I love the published books because they’re slim, nothing falls out, and they’re all uniform looking. We were surprised how often people look at them. Every time people are over they’re picking one up. It’s been great.
My mom has a dresser (think 4 drawers FULL) of photos. No organization. Utter chaos. And it’s hilariously fun to go searching for something because you never know what you will find. On my birthday, my sister found – and posted on social media – a photo of me around 5 years old in a horizontal pink and white stripe shirt with vertical pink stripe flood pants. I can’t believe that exists…and now resides on the internet. It makes me laugh-cry just thinking about it. Which is a long way of saying: don’t stress. You’re taking pictures. That’s the important part!
Shutterfly.com is my best friend! I make one for each kid for years 1 to 5 then just do an elementary years and so on. It saves so much money because you can add as many pictures as you want without printing. I don’t know what I would do without it! Also, as the offspring of a crazy crafty scrapping mother I so cherish that each of us has our own scrapbooks ( yes it may be like 10 and taking over storage space..) but I LOVE that now that I’m grown and have my own house and children those memories are at my finger tips. So..With that being said.. A family book would be fine.. just order multiple copies:)
My husband’s grandma does something I find cute, and makes very simple photo books every year or two for the whole family. The first pages are a labled set of family pictures. In the older ones she’d write a short month by month synopsis of the year (less than 3 sentences per month unless something huge like a wedding or graduation happened) interspersed with pictures. Now she does a section for each child’s family.
They are so fun to go through, even though she never worries much about the looks and just crams pictures on pages. She only captions if there is a funny story she doesn’t expect everyone to know. It’s amazing how entertaining and precious these books are, even though they are very low effort compared to most scrapbooking.
If you did something similar it would be so sweet to include your monthly letters to the girls, and then you’d have most of the summarizing done and get to do the fun photo parts!
Set aside an hour a day for a week or so. Just thinking about scheduling an entire weekend to sort through photos on the computer gives me hives. I would be much more likely to skip that. Just set a timer for a certain amount of time and then you know once the hour is up, you can get up and do something else. Much more manageable!
I only make photo books of vacations. It’s easy because they will all be in one folder to upload. It’s been a long time since I ordered any prints of anything different. Other random pics would take so long to find and pick through. I scrapbooked through when the kids were maybe 5 and 2? They are 15 and 12 now. Granted, I don’t take as many pictures of them nowadays- mostly on vacations!
I too have too many pictures of my twins and not nearly enough printed off. I did recently find MySocialBook. If you tell cute stories about your kids on FB and post some of your pictures there, you totally need to order a MySocialBook! It will grab all your FB content (from dates you specifiy)and design it into an awesome scrapbook! You can even go through and choose which posts you want it to skip. I was pretty skeptical at first, but figured I didn’t have much to lose so I gave it a try. My husband was even more skeptical. We were both more than excited after we got it. We now have so many fun stories and notes from friends from when they were first born and their first year that we didn’t even know we had, because, let’s face it, who has time to view all your notifications on FB when you’re caring for 2 new babies. 🙂 I know this doesn’t solve the dilemma you have with all the rest of your pictures, but it may help you get some memories into print. 🙂
I have thousands of pictures on my computer of me and my husband and our family…but when we had my daughter (she is now two) I decided I need to start printing pictures. But, it is too expensive and too time consuming to do it in large clumps, so I broke it down, and every 3 months or so I send the pics I want to print to Walgreens online and just pick them up in store. I bought some cute albums from Hobby Lobby to put them in and I just put them in order and am done with it! I love the idea of scrapbooking and all, but lets be real…I don’t have time or patience for that.