Whew, I finally finished our photo album from our Montana trip this summer! It turned out to be a big task considering we took several hundred photos. Even after I deleted the duplicates and crappy ones, I still had about 500 photos left to work with. Needless to say, it turned into a much bigger project than I’d planned.
I think I’m pretty organized in most areas of my life, but managing digital photos is definitely not one of them. After downloading pics onto my computer, rarely do I ever print or display them. Around here, iPhoto is pretty much a graveyard where pictures go to die. Many of these photos are priceless, though, so I’m determined to get better at this!!
I decided to tackle the Montana album before too much time passed. Thankfully I’d blogged about most of our adventures, which turned out to be a good reference when my memory failed me. Since I am not into scrapbooking (all those cutesy papers and stickers totally stress me out!), I decided that a digital photo book was the way to go. After comparing several tools, I concluded that Shutterfly seemed like the most user-friendly and cost-effective option. Then I got to work creating my custom album…..and 50 pages later it was finally complete! Here are some of my favorite spreads:
Click here to view the entire album
While creating this photo album was a time-consuming process, I’m more inspired than ever to keep up with our digital photos (our printed photos will remain in their archival boxes). Ideally, I’d love to create family yearbooks like this one where I add photos each month so it doesn’t become a huge project at the end of the year. So, here’s my plan to keep things manageable moving forward:
- When downloading photos from my camera, immediately edit and upload the best ones to my Shutterfly account.
- Delete, delete, delete! Not every photo is a keeper.
- At the end of each month, create layouts using the best photos from that month.
- At the end of the year when an album is complete, also order a CD containing all the pictures and store it in an adhesive CD pocket attached to the inside back cover of the album.
- When perfectionism rears its ugly head, remember these words: “It could be perfect or it could be FINISHED!”.
Any tips for me? Do you have a system for organizing your photos or are they collecting virtual dust like mine?
