Say Cheese

I take thousands of pictures of my kids.  They aren’t all frame worthy gems, but I have gazillions of them and I treasure them.  Once I bought my iPhone, which takes amazing quality snaps, I’ve been in love and snapping away.  I always have my phone with me and I see photo opportunities everywhere, most often when I’m with my kids.  We bought an expensive camera made by Canon when Hunter was born, but I rarely use it.  The camera is unwieldy and it’s not nearly as portable as my phone.  Most of the time I keep my iPhone in my pocket where it’s in easy reach to click off pics in seconds.  I can’t say the same for the camera, which I would have to rush off to get, and by the time I was finally ready to take a picture, the moment I wanted so desperately to catch would be gone.  I was playing with the kids in their room this weekend and Zoey was making a tower with her blocks.  She wanted to make one that was taller than her.  Hunter knocked it over a few times and she had to start over.  I helped her hold it upright and she made a tower that wasn’t as tall as she is standing, but was taller than her in a sitting position.  I had my phone with me and took a picture of her with it.  About thirty seconds later, Hunter knocked it down again and Zoey, upset, folded her arms across her chest, I was able to capture that moment too.

As is the modern problem, I now have more pictures than ever before.  I began to wonder if I should continue to print them or find something else to do with them?  Putting them into albums takes up so much more space and I rarely take the time to thumb through the albums anyway.  I don’t have an inch of storage space left, the albums I have are crammed together in a cabinet and are inconvenient to get to.  I would rather sit at the computer and watch a slideshow than go through the trouble of pulling these albums out.  

I’ll still print photos I want to frame, but have decided I’ll stop printing them in mass.  I literally had a stack of hundreds of photos on my bookcase from events that happened over a year ago.  I took some half filled photo albums out a few months back with the intent to stick these photos inside.  I was overwhelmed as I couldn’t easily ascertain when the photos were taken and the order they should go in.  The daunting task of sitting at the computer (with kids crawling all over my lap) to get the dates and label all of these photos was too much to bear and I didn’t do it.  So, the picture envelopes and the photos albums collected dust.  In the meantime, of course, I took thousands more pictures and printed even more of them.  My stack of Costco photo envelopes grew and the dust continued to collect--that is until now.

Now, I have a plan.  I don’t want to get so far behind that I won’t ever catch up.  Life will only get busier and I want my memories to be accessible.  This past weekend I was determined to get a handle on this.  I put on a movie for Zoey, put Hunter down for a nap and set to work.  It went against all of my sensibilities, but I didn’t look up the dates on which the pics were taken.  Instead, I grouped together as many as I could into piles by event, like Zoey’s third birthday party,  As I said, I was very behind, Zoey will be four next month. I quickly wrote the month and year, if I was sure, on the backs and began plugging the photos into their clear plastic homes in a race against time, before Hunter woke up.  Zoey dug around me and snatched some photos for an album of her own.  Some I fought her on taking and some I let her have without a second thought.  I know that a fair amount of these pictures are out of order.  How old was Hunter in that photo, versus that one and that one?  It was hard to say, he’s grown so fast.  I hated to do it, but I continued to guess on the placement.  With about thirty photos left I ran out of space in the albums I had.  I won’t be buying more.  I placed these pictures back into the Costco envelope from whence they came and shoved them, along with the photo albums, back into the overstuffed cabinet.  

I will be doing things differently from now on.  I found my photo saving grace on Pinterest (you can follow me there: Trisha Harmon and see my repins, if you’re a member). I searched for photo organization and got lucky.  I’m excited about the new way I will be bottling time with pictures for my family.  I have some backtracking to do, in regard to organizing my digital files, but I have a plan and will chip away at it until I catch up. Once I’m caught up, after I take pictures, I will edit and name them the same day, so I don’t get behind again. 

On Pinterest I came across a Blog called A Thousand Words and had to look no further.  Check out the specific post that will save me or if you have a pinterest account, here’s the pin.  This blogger’s post has photo organization ideas that I love, from the Expedit bookcases (from IKEA), to naming and saving digital files, to making yearly slide shows and printing a yearly photo book.  I borrowed some of her photos below.  

The expedit bookcases.  I don’t have a great deal of space right now, but eventually I think these would be great to have.

An example of how to label picture files:

Year Month Day Description

Blogger Jen, from A Thousand Words, uses and recommends Blurb for her photo books.  I have heard about this site before.  A while back, when I first started thinking about this, I posed a question on Facebook: Does anyone print pictures anymore?  A friend from high school, Meredith, told me she maintains a family blog on which she posts her best family photos and journals about them.  Similar to Jen, she uses Blurb and at the end of the year she prints a book of her postings.  I love this!  I will be doing this with Bottling Time at the end of the year.  Blurb isn’t just for photo books, it’s also a place where you can self publish books, such as children’s and photo essay books. These books will take up less space than a photo album and you can choose from different layouts and styles and add descriptions or stories.  It seems amazing and excited about using this site.  Once I get my photos (I will go back to the beginning of 2012) edited and labeled I will begin working on adding these to blurb and begin creating my book.  It’s set up so photos can be added to throughout the year and at the end I can order a book.  There are so many of sites out there today that do photo books and I can’t say if this one is better or not, but the prices and quality seem good and it’s got word of mouth, which is good enough for me. 

I also came across two other cool things on pinterest that I wanted to share.  I came across a really cute video from Kodak about keeping, protecting and sharing your photos.  Click here (Kodak)  and take the time to watch it, you won’t be disappointed.  

Also, are your kids art projects coming out of your ears? There’s a phone app for that!  It works along the same idea as Blurb, but is specific for kids artwork.  It’s called ArtKive and was free when I downloaded it (I think it’s just for iPhones right now).  You simply take pictures of your children’s artwork, and add in the dates, etc, then eventually you can print this into a coffee table book.  Zoey loves painting and we already have a box of her artwork that we add to almost everyday.  I framed her first painting but don’t think it’s realistic to save every master piece.  I don’t think I’ll have the heart to throw away every one, but knowing I would have a record of them in a coffee table sure would make it easier to fathom.  Technology is an amazing thing and it’s going to help me organize my memories!

What are you doing with your photos now?