Photos. Love ’em! Hate ’em!!
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| I happen to LOVE this one!! |
I love them for the obvious reason that they are wonderful treasures of the memories we share together as a family! I get some really cute, cute pictures that make me giddy! But, when it comes to what to do with those photos, that’s when it gets hard. It can be hard to find the time to work with them and sometimes, even hard to find the money to print them!
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| Isnt’ he the sweetest thing ever?! |
I started from before I was married, through the first several years of marriage, by putting them all in those photo albums where you don’t have to write anything….just stuff them in and be done. I tell ya, that’s a bit appealing sometimes now. But, truth be told, I really like having writing and embellishments to help make it more appealing to the eye. I like it to explain to me who [or what] in the world we are looking at. Of course, when we were just stuffing it into the books, that was back in the Stone Age when you still had film to get developed and automatically bought doubles in case you wanted to give some to your friends! It was almost just as cheap to get doubles anyway!
After having kids for a few years, I decided to start scrapbooking. That was fun! I LOVED getting together with my friends and working together on our scrapbooks. Not only did we get something accomplished, but we also got to enjoy socializing a bit as well. Our children benefited by getting to have their friends over for the day. We had someone to tell our stories to and then later, when we were done, we could ooh and ahh over the pictures and show daddy. My children LOVE looking at their old pictures. They can pour over them for a long time, laughing and reminiscing. When mom was done scrapbooking for the day, they were always waiting for daddy to get home so they could show them all to him!
My close friend, Amy, whom I liked to scrapbook with the most, moved away and it seems like everyone else who I tried to invite over to scrapbook with me, either wasn’t interested in doing that any more or couldn’t take the time. I found myself not doing anything. [Yes, I’m one who needs to do things with other people….at least things that involve sitting for hours!] My pictures, I would take and upload onto facebook and/or photobucket and only print if I was getting a good deal.
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| Sometimes, the lighting is all wrong and you cut faces out and some even get hidden, but at least the dog is smiling! |
Finally, I started paying attention to people who were talking about digital scrapbooking and getting in on some of the deals for photo books that were printed by individual photo companies. That is my newest way to handle all the photos. So far, I’ve been very pleased with how the books have turned out. I’ve been especially pleased with our vacation book that we ordered from Shutterfly.
But how do you keep all those photos organized?
I use a free program called Google Picasa. It’s a photo storage and editing program that sorts all your photos on your hard drive by person as well as keeps them in the individual folders that you had stored them in, on your hard drive. It has face recognition and you can individually categorize each photo by person. It makes it faster for you by recognizing who someone is, after you’ve categorized a few. While that can take a long time to set up, it’s so nice to be able to click on a person’s name and have all the photos of that person be together in a folder. I also use my Memory Manager 3.0 software from Creative Memories for editing. I had originally gotten it for both storage and editing but so far, I’ve been happiest with it as an editing software and would prefer to stick with Picasa for the storage and sorting. The Memory Makers software can do things that you can’t do in Picnik.
How do YOU handle YOUR mounds of photos?
