I've been having a small mental crisis about what to do about pictures.
Ever since Anna was born, on Tuesdays I take all the pictures off of the cameras, upload the good ones to Wal-Mart, have the prints made (it used to be cheaper to have them delivered to the store but now it's cheaper to have them mailed to the house!) and then I put them into the albums the very day they come in the mail. It's not too hard to stay caught up and it's worked well.
But now with all of the new cool photo book options and with the inevitable decay that goes along with little fingers looking at standard photo albums, I'm wondering if I need to adjust my system but every time I start to think about it I get all flustered. Which company? How often do you make a book? What is going to last long term? Which option is cost effective? How important is it to have prints quickly? How important is it to have prints that we can grab out of a book at the last minute for a school thing?
breathe...
I make a blurb book of the Lobmeyer League emails that I send out every week, but I only print those books once every three years and they only have a few pictures per week.
But is that enough? Is anything else just overkill and a waste of time? Or should I keep printing more pictures than just the few that get sent out in the email? Or what if the company goes out of business and I've wasted years of work?
You see the problem.
Does anyone have any answers?
3 comments:
I go through this question every year or two! It sounds like you have a great system and routine that you follow through on!
Kids love looking at themselves, so is overkill really a possibility? I'm not sure. :)
As for what holds up the best--I'm not sure about that either! Not only little fingers, but tornado, fire, etc. Usually they only get to look through the books with close supervision. I have a backup drive with all our pics on it, so I comfort myself that IF something happened, I could potentially re-do it.
Photo books are nice because you can fit a lot in a little space. But I think actual photos are a little nicer to look at.
I don't think there is a perfect answer, but I was encouraged when my husband told me he thought memory-keeping was an investment for our kids, not just a hobby. And I remind myself that whatever I manage to get done with pictures, is more than it would be if I did NOTHING! Happy photo-ing!
Last time I printed pics for an album was 13 years ago after our honeymoon. We like to just put them in files on the computer and look at them on our computer when we have visitors or just want to remember. I put all the big family stuff on my blog and keep telling myself that I will print my blog in book form someday. That's probably as close to an album as I will ever get.
I've been having a similar dilemma. I haven't printed pictures since Ari's first year and those are all still in boxes, not albums. sigh. I did make a "my first year" photo book for each of the kids and I make an annual book highlighting events from each month. For those I use shutterfly. I try to stick to their 20 page standard and wait until a coupon/special rolls around. It usually takes me until June for me to compile the book and time that with a coupon.
Our hard drive is getting dangerously full and I'm trying to back things up on an external hard-drive. My problem is I'm too scared to delete anything even though I have double, almost triple (I keep pic's on my camera until it's too full), redundancy.
Other than that, I don't know either. Tech savvy, I am not! :)
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