Late post today! I opted for sleeping in then sweating hard at bootcamp. Now I’m sitting in a parking lot blogging while Kaitlyn snoozes in the car seat. I’m feeling pretty clever for remembering my computer! Moving on…
Evidently I’ve never mentioned my family albums before, huh?
I love that you guys wanted to hear more abut them, so I’m happy to share!
It started when we got married. I was obsessed (still am) with looking through our family albums growing up and when David and I got married in 2009, I knew I wanted to document our lives (to excess, but what can I say, I love pictures). The first album I did was through Shutterfly.
I organized my pictures, picked out the top best from each event and put time into making each page colorful and cute.
Then I got real and realized that I would never keep up with them if I did them like that because it just took too much time. If I had that kind of time, I would go old school scrapbook styles because I ADORE real scrapbooks. So I needed a solution that would cut down on time.
And so I found a solution.
I made another blog. Yup, I have another blog. It’s not that exciting because I only keep it for this purpose, so it’s 100% private. I use it solely to upload my pictures and organize them into events. You could do this too, through any free blog service like wordpress.com or blogger.com.
I do my best to keep it current, making each event a separate blog post. Then, at the end of every year I use the service Blog2Print to turn it into a bound book.
The pros: I get all my pictures in books that I can keep out on my coffee table. It’s ridiculously easy. You can write details about the pictures if you wanted to/have the time. I did this with my pregnancy posts.
The cons: The picture quality. I’d say it’s fair to good, but not great. There can be some awkward, wasted white space if you choose ‘autofill’ when making the book, which I usually do.
This year I’m trying to do a better job at sizing my pictures as I go and only picking my favorites instead of dumping 10 of the same looking picture on each post to make it shorter.
The cost for my books, which are pretty thick, ends up being around $150, but you could make it much shorter if you’d like.
Are these perfect? No, but they’re still pretty great. If I didn’t make these each year I know my pictures would all be piled up on my external hard drive and would never see the light of day.
How do you store your pictures?
Do you ever go back through and look at them?
Are you a family album lover too?
Brittany says
Love the albums! I’d like to create some and use as coffee table books!
Katie says
I want to make race books since I don’t have a family yet, but I haven’t figured out the best way to organize my photos in iphoto, let alone make the darn book! So for now I rely on timehop to show me memories.
John J. says
As our family grew I took some of our pictures and made collages out of them and then framed them. Not very artful but memorable. I still have those pictures. Our exercise room’s wall have these pictures there – bringing gratitude and positive energy, motivating me to work out so that I can continue to enjoy living and loving the people smiling out to me!
Kathryn Doherty says
I’ve been meaning to do this! I had a freebie small photo book from Shutterfly that I tried out and decided that something digital was better than getting all my pictures printed and stuffing them into photo albums. Plus, you can write when/where the pictures were in the books. I like to think I’ll remember all the details about my kiddos and what they were up to , but I know I won’t. Thanks for the inspiration – I’m gonna get back into checking out the options!
Erin @ Her Heartland Soul says
So fun! I did one of these for Josh and my first year together and cherish it.
Carolina Charm says
I was SO hoping you’d write this post! YAY! You are seriously super mommy. I don’t know HOW you manage to cook phenomenal meals, watch two munchkins AND on top of the 234235432543534 things you do CREATE A FAMILY PHOTO ALBUM….ANNUALLY! You put my mommy skills to shame. Bravo, friend!
Paulina says
I’m so glad you wrote about this! I automatically upload my phone pictures to shutterfly for storage, and then sometimes order prints to frame at home. I don’t actually have a home computer right now since my laptop crashed, so I’m way behind on ordering/creating any photo books. I love your books, thanks for sharing.
Heather @hungryforbalance says
What a great idea! I, too, love looking at photo albums and now that we have Matilda, that would be a great way to remember the special parts of the years.
Lauren @ Oh Hey I Like That! says
I LOVE photo albums! I used to make them all the time. I was a big fan of making them through iPhoto back in the day, but I like your idea for Blog2Print too!!
Lindsey @ Simply Lindsey says
Thanks for sharing more about the albums! That’s such a cool concept! I was really diligent about keeping up with photo albums in high school and college, but since grad school I stopped! I guess I got too busy and I also stopped taking as many pictures. At this point, I want to print lots of them and/or make some albums for the past 6 years! I absolutely love the albums that I have and the ones that my Mom made of our family growing up. It’s so fun to look back at them and remember those stages of life!
Sarah says
Thank you for sharing, this is so great! I am great about keeping all my photos very organized on my external hard drive (organized by months within each year), but I’ve never made them into albums. Come to think if it, it IS silly that these photos are just sitting on my hard drive and not being looked at. I also constantly worry that if I ever broke my external drive, that my years and years of memories would be instantly gone! I have a blog that I use to document pictures and milestones for my 2 year old daughter, and will be starting one soon for my newborn son as well. I use Google blogger, so now I will have to look into the Blog 2 Print. Thanks!!
Sherry says
I’d hire you to do that for us:) It takes so much time doing all the organization, I don’t think we could afford you:) So great to look back and enjoy!
Alice says
I do this for my parents and my in laws, using mostly pics of the kids but a few with the whole family, too. After doing it for 2 years, my husband requested a copy, so now I make one book, print 3 copies, and everyone is happy. My kids LOVE looking at them, too!
I think maybe I need to do a family one for us!
Jen says
I love making albums! You should check out the Shutterfly storybook app, which easily lets you create scrapbook style albums form a mobile device or computer. You can keep all of your photos uploaded into different albums by category, then select the ones to add to the album, and an automatic photobook will be created!
Carrie says
I pretty much do the same thing, keep a personal blog to turn into my family photo albums, but I use Blurb. Blurb also allows you to import your website, but it gives you total control over photo spacing, use of space, and all other organization. Also the picture quality is very good. I take decent pictures with a DSLR and have been very happy with the way they look. I’ve also heard good things about Mixbook but have not used it to make books. Just thought I’d share.
Chantal says
I make yearly albums for the kids. I actually just finished my daughter’s 2013 album, and I’m working my way through 2014… yeah, I procrastinated a bit. I’m going to do separate ones once this baby is born! I also make albums for big events and trips. I keep it simple – I just add photos chronologically, I don’t really design the pages, I just place the photos and that’s it. No words. Like a regular photo album, except they’re printed 😉 Much easier process!
Colette says
I am a big fan of trying to do an annual album, even if it takes me til June to get 2014 done:) I used the Shutterfly storybook app to do our daughters baby album, it was pretty easy and has an auto-fill option. I also just tried a project using Artifact Uprising, and LOVE the quality of the photos. Made me feel like a real professional, ha!
Sarah says
My husband makes those every year using the online photo center at Walgreens.com. He started the year we met… It’s so fun to pull them out to see how far we’ve come!