Storing pictures: innovations in photo albums
4 comments so far
Disclaimer: This may be common knowledge, but the amount of time I’ve spent in craft stores over the course of my entire life is less than the amount of time it will take me to complete this post, so what I’m going to share with you is news to me. If you already know about it, my apologies.
Saturday I ran errands with my wife and son. My wife and I are trying to be good about keeping a family history, so it was off to Robert’s to buy a photo album. Now, I consider myself a fairly tech-savvy guy and the last time I used a photo album for anything was probably about eight years ago. While there are, of course, benefits to keeping your pictures digitally, there are also some downsides:
1. Labeling/tagging and organizing them can be very time consuming.
2. Even with backups, there’s always a chance of losing everything.
3. There’s something wonderful about the tangible, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. (Ha!)
Since I last bought a photo album the makers of such albums have almost universally added a small, but significant feature: a spot for a CD in the back.
What a brilliant way to index your photos! Print off the most important ones – the ones you’d want to show off and really miss if they were lost. Put them in the album. Put unabridged photos on a disk and stick it in the back of the album. Now you have the best of the best printed and preserved and as well as a backup of all your pictures. You also have a handy visual index of where to find which photos.
The album itself was relatively inexpensive (about $13) and you can print off 4×6 prints at Walgreens or Walmart for about ten cents each. That means you can buy and fill a photo album for about $35 including tax. Our goal is to fill one album a year.
Why are we doing this? Because, as I said earlier, there’s something beautiful about holding something that’s been passed down to you from generations earlier. Face it, your grandkids inheriting your Flickr username and password isn’t going to mean nearly as much as if you left them a complete and well-documented photo album. :)
Does anybody else out there still use old-school photo albums?
Thanks for reading!
LivSimpl
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Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under Family, Organization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
This post induced much guilt on my part: I just looked at my iPhoto albums and there are 6,716 photos in there, NONE of which are printed. The one album a year is a good idea- seems like a realistic goal. Now if I can just somehow magically make the first three years of my combined kids’ lives appear in a photo album…
I actually started fixing up an album yesterday since I’ve had a stack of printed photos sitting around since 2004. It really is difficult to choose which ones to print though…the CD option is a great idea. Thanks!
This is great. I keep getting photo albums as gifts and I keep not using them. You’re right in that passing on my username for my online photo storage isn’t nearly as cool to hold as an actual album.
Off I go to print photos for the albums!
I did this for my mother for Christmas. I found a really beautiful inexpensive photo album at Marshall’s that had a little window on the front that you could put a picture in.
I sorted through all our pictures from our summer vacation to Europe and took the SD cartridge to Walgreen’s. In retrospect I’d either have them printed by an online photo service or print them myself- because it took me an hour to do it at Walgreen’s, plus I had to come back an hour later to pick up the pictures.
Mom LOVED the gift and she keeps it on her coffee table for guests to thumb through.