Today is Backwards day at WFMW...which means I ask and you tell me what works for you. So here is my question..
Where digital photography is concerned, what works for you? We’ve got everything backed up and cataloged on a safe hard drive (this is completely BgK’s domain, and he rocks it). But how much do you print? What do you do with your prints? Do you only scrapbook? Do you only use photo albums? How many photo albums per year do you fill?
We have a baby scrapbook for MAM, and a “first 18 months” photo album. Then I’ve got some other random little albums, but not really a system. Any advice on how to get into the routine of printing pics, of what to do with said pics, where to store said pics, etc, would be greatly appreciated.
THANK YOU!
We have 6 children and they each have a phot album where I put all their photos in. I have a family scrapbook where the family photos go in. I don’t spend a lot of time on it though.
Esther
Our pictures are backed up on a separate hard drive too, but I still worry about losing them. I’m old fashioned too, I like to touch them.
I switched to photo boxes after my second child was born. I quickly realized that at the current rate, we would need a separate room for photo albums. I’ve gotten better about only printing the best. I separate them by month and keep them on a shelf in the closet.
Someday I hope to scrapbook my faves…so far I have two pages done for my oldest…he’s 3.
I use shutterfly.com and make my “scrapbooks” online. They have a lot of great features so you can really customize how the books look. I have a 2-year-old, and every year I do one photo album for him (since there seem to be way more photos of him than anybody else!) and one family album. They have sales going all the time so it probably costs me $40 or $50 a year for the two books.
I’m going to lurk and read all your comments, because those are really good questions…
I upload all my photos to Walgreens.com (although Walmart and CVS do the same I use Walgreens because it is convenient). I upload all my photos to my laptop after an event or after my memory card is full. Then I go to their site and log in and create a new album. I upload the entire photo folder I created for the event to their folder. From there I can edit the photos, print them and pick them up at the store or have them mailed to me, and share them with family and friends. I can even have them printed for someone else to pick up at a Walgreens near them. I even did my son’s photo birthday cards through Walgreens. Not only is it convenient but it also serves as a way to back up my photos and I can access them from anywhere I have internet access. Then when I get home I just pop them in an album.
I have mine on an EHD and also burned on to DVDs.
I print out few, but now I do digital scrapbooking (examples on my blog). With that, I select maybe just one photo that sums up the event, and make a digital layout of it.
I print most of these to put in albums, and have some frames the correct size for my layouts and which I change frequently.
No-one else wants to see ALL my holiday photos, but they enjoy viewing my digi-scrap pages, either in print or on-line. At least they pretend to enjoy them š
Well, here is what I do as far as my “system”:
I try to take my memory card in monthly (or download online) to Walmart (purely for convenience in picking them up) and have 1 archive CD made of ALL photos on the card. Then I select those worth printing (usually anywhere from 75-200 copies – I hand out doubles to all the family). I put a few in a scrapbook, throw the rest in an album, just so I have them somewhere to keep.
Here is what I need to figure out what to do about:
If there’s a fire, all my photos, scrapbooks, and CDs are going to burn up. So what good is having them all located in my house? I need to think of a different backup system…
i use shutterfly also. i just save the book and add to it as i upload pics off the camera and then when there are 30 or so pages (about two-four books a year), i go through and fill in the captions and when shutterfly runs a sale, i buy it! i don’t make separate books for each kid or anything, i just try to keep a family story-record of what’s going on and how cute everyone is! the only exception is the first year book for my second 2 kids (didn’t have digital photography with my first!) where i put together each month’s pic for the first year into a separate book. good luck!
I load all my digital prints onto the computer & go thru them. Then I send out to Snap fish or somewhere to get prints done on only the ones I want. I keep an old fashioned photo album complete with comments on who/what/where/when with each of the pictures. I use the “slide them in” kind of album. (No scrapbooking here….too time consuming!)
I also make an album for each of my kids. Specific to them. For these albums, I usually cut/trim the actual photo by hand around the child to make it smaller to fit more on the page. I ruthlessly keep only the most important part. I use the “magnetic” sticky page kind of album (gasp!) for them. But I do make sure they are the photo-safe ones. I label these by writing info on sticky file folder labels & putting on the page. I go along til the album is filled, usually 3 to 5 years’ worth.
I’ve started saving my digital photos on a CD, but find I still like to have them on the computer for manipulating later. (different size print, cropped part of a photo, Christmas letter picture, emailing, etc.—these things I usually print at home)
Truthfully, no one likes to look at my albums, but me. EXCEPT when we need to look up when something happened (wedding?) or who was there. THEN they thank me! ha!
From time to time, the kids do go back & look at their albums, seeing themselves as babies or remembering that vacation or birthday.
Good Luck!
Ronda
Thanks for stopping by and your advice on getting my baby back to sleep. š
As for your question – I scrapbook (or at least I hope to get back to scrapbooking when baby does actually sleep again) my good pictures and the pictures that I do not choose to scrapbook just go into a plain jane photo album in chronological order. I get prints made at Sam’s Club as they are significantly cheaper than anywhere else than I have tried and I enjoy that I can also submit them online to pick up later at the store. Hope that helps some. š
I have not used this service yet but have read about it and it seems worthwhile: http://www.blurb.com. You can make the “digital scrapbooks” similar to shutterfly with the advantage of being able to edit on your own computer rather than online. Also, it can turn a blog into a book, which appeals to me. You might want to check it out.
At any rate, I backup my photos and I do not print very many of them. For awhile I was printing them and putting them into photo albums but I thought it became a bit expensive to do this. I do like to scrapbook but would really like to learn to digi scrap with Photoshop. I have not made this a priority yet and have not learned how to do it. At this moment, I just scroll through the photos on my computer rather than printing them.