In my quest to get a year’s worth of projects done before September 26th, I’ve been reorganizing the photo albums and getting all the pictures sorted and put away. (And man, do I hate this job. It is clear why my wedding scrapbook remains unfinished.)
Anyway, I used to save All The Pictures that we printed. And put them in an album. But this was back when I had a film camera, so only about half the pictures were any good. I recently (eh, at some point this year, I have been procrastinating this project because I dislike it so) decided that this was stupid and that there was no point to wasting space on a bad, blurry picture of myself. So I went through all the photo albums (and the random stack of loose pictures that I found tucked around the house) and took out all the ones that would never have been printed in the age of digital.
Then the really annoying part of the job began. I had two photo albums, that I made at separate times, but that the pictures overlapped in. So I took all the keep worthy pictures out and combined the two albums into one cohesive album. I complained about doing it the whole time on Twitter too.
(I also sorted and albumized all the professional pictures of Elizabeth that we’ve had done. But that was fun and easier, being that there were only three years of pictures instead of thirty one years worth of disorganized pictures.)
Here’s what I learned from this:
1. I hate printed pictures. (Unless they are big pictures for framing.)
2. I am never printing a big batch of random 4X6 prints again. (In my defense, I don’t think *I* had much to do with the two giant photo albums. They were from my childhood and from Matt’s, and that is just what you DID back then.)
3. Shutterfly (or equivalent) books are the way to go. I’ve done one for Elizabeth for each year and I am starting to do others too. (I just did our Disney vacations.)
4. It is virtually impossible to put landscape pictures with no people into chronological order.
5. It is impossible to put pictures of black cats into chronological order. They do not change, no matter if they are one or fifteen years old.
6. I had a lot of pictures from people who gave me pictures. I decided that I did not need to keep every single picture from a middle school friend’s trip to Ireland.
How about you? What are your feelings on pictures? Do you print and album? Scrapbook? (And if so, want to finish my wedding scrapbook for me? I’ve got four pages done. Been married nine years!) Keep everything digital? Some other option? How often do you take out pictures and look at them?
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I have albums. I have stacks of loose pictures that I swear I will album some day, just as soon as I have more albums and spare time. Going to school full time and having a toddler does not bode well for spare time. Thus…
I am now digital. Photos are mostly taken with our phones, despite the fact that we have two – count ‘em 2! – digital cameras. I download them on to my computer about once a month, if I remember. Two months ago I finally went through and renamed them all by date, deleted blurry or duplicates, and sorted them into folders by age so that I could burn them to disk and send them to my grandmother. I then made a flash drive copy for my dad – yay! People with pictures! I will most likely update these things and do it again at Christmas, along with some for my husband’s parents (who get to see the Boy relatively frequently as it is). Pictures are so much easier on the computer. One day I might even get them into my dropbox so in case the computer crashes, I don’t lose them all!
Yes, I hate prints now. Snapfish/shutterfly books all the way. I miss scrapbooking accents and backgrounds, but digital is waaay easier and holds up better. For special circumstances, I’ve scanned scrapbook paper in and used it as a background in the digital album.
I was born in an inconvenient era, photo-wise. The first four years of my life are in my “baby album” (along with a lot of pictures of my sister, aged 2 1/2 to 6 1/2. I always thought that was kind of unfair.) The next eleven years of my life are in shoeboxes because my mother never got around to albuming them. The eight years since we got a digital camera are in a disorganized mass on the computer. (I started sorting through them a while back as a favor to my mother and didn’t get very far.) Sometime I want to go through and get the best pictures from my childhood and make a Snapfish album or something. I always loved looking through my baby pictures as a child and would have loved to look through photos of my parents as children/teens. (My uncles are just now unearthing some pictures of my mother as a child; I think my dad literally didn’t have his picture taken at all until he joined the Army at 17.)
My husband has four younger siblings, spaced at convenient 2 1/2 year intervals, so his childhood is fairly well documented almost by accident. (They basically went straight from one baby album to another.) I should ask my mother-in-law to make me a scrapbook as a Christmas present or something. (Maybe for next year…I assume these things take a long time.)
Random side note: My dad loves taking pictures of buildings and flowers. It drives my mother insane. She wants him to at least make sure his children are standing in front of the buildings and flowers.
So far the only albuming I do is on Facebook. I do want to get some wedding pictures printed for framing (I got married almost a year ago), maybe make an album. My photographer already sifted out the bad pictures (we got a CD, which is awesome) but I still probably don’t need all 8 pictures of our first dance or however many there are. Making albums is kind of tedious work, so it’s easy to put off in favor of something else, but I would love to have an album to look through simply for myself (did I mention my photographer was awesome?), and if you’re showing your photos to guests (do people do that or am I just narcissistic?) it just seems more classy to have a physical album rather than saying, “Okay, just let me log on to Facebook.”
I have had many grand plans of printing photos and putting them into albums (such that I have a few empty albums sitting around — don’t make me confess when I actually purchased them). But I haven’t. Lately everything has been digital, but I’d like to do something at least… like Shutterfly books so that my kids can flip through the pics rather than staring at a screen. Also, I need to make books like that for the grandmas. Because they never get enough/any photos because I’m terrible about printing them.
I am perpetually several years behind on all photo-related projects, so I guess the honest answer is that I do none of these things.
I scrapbook and I love it. However, I’ve been doing it since I was 16 and I guarantee that 14 years of practice is the only reason I can keep up with the number of pictures I take of the kids. I like photo books, but I really love working with the paper/letters/stickers/photos/memorabilia that goes into making my own books.
Also, I would totally scrapbook your wedding for you, provided you have backups of the photos so that if you HATE what I did you would still have other copies of the pictures. (No seriously, I’ll do it.)
It’s entirely possible that I will take you up on this.
I used to have all of my photos in chronological photo albums. Then I got the bright idea to take them all out to save space and put them in photo boxes. Now I’m pissed because I can never find the picture I’m looking for. In an ideal world, I’d scan them all, back them up twice and ditch the originals.
Love pictures. I kept & still keep all my photos in albums, labelled with names & dates and organized in chronological order (although I am about — cough, cough — 10 years behind at the moment — I used to be much better). All my negatives are also filed in chronological order with the dates & subjects written on the envelopes. I can usually lay my hands on any photo or negative that I want pretty quickly.
My digital camera/software downloads photos into folders by date… I keep those and organize them into monthly & then yearly photos (e.g., August 2012, September 2012, which eventually go into a folder for 2012). I download photos to my computer as soon as possible after they are taken, and once the card is full, I get a complete set of photos printed & a backup CD made. I make another backup CD which I take to my mother’s (so that she can see the photos & so that I have a backup copy offsite). And I also backup my computer onto an external hard drive a couple of times a year.
I scrapbook too — well, I have; I haven’t done it in awhile. :p