Photos, photos, and more photos… over 108,000 of them in my Lightroom catalogue, let alone the boxes and boxes of prints that I have from before the digital era. Crazy, I know! Why am I telling you this? Because it’s what I do with those photos that makes my heart sing… I frame them, I post them, I share them, I gift them, I scrapbook them.
When I had my first baby, near the beginning of the digital camera era, I had snapped over 1100 photos of her before she was 3 months old – more than I had taken the previous three years combined! After framing and filling a loooooong hallway wall with photos of those early months, I feared I’d end up wallpapering my whole house with her photos before her first birthday! So I had to find another way to give those special memories some love, and that’s when I entered the world of scrapbooking!
In the early days, I primarily bought lots of scrappy stuff, dreaming of all the wonderful pages I would create. Truth be told, it took a while before I actually jumped in and started creating. A little bit intimidated, a little bit overwhelmed, a little bit unsure of what to do, so I started looking at classes to take (yes, I LOVE organized learning!) and found classes to help me along the way.
One of those classes (well really it’s a more of a challenge than a class) and a primary way I make time to scrap is LOAD – layout a day. And LOAD is right around the corner – during the month of February (May and October, too) we are challenged to create a layout every day. It’s AWESOME! It might sound overwhelming, but just like Capture Your 365, there are no daily police, no one is waiting to kick you out if you don’t post that day. It’s a matter of having a community to share your passion and experience with; a prompt to inspire a daily creation; and a personal goal to document your story and photos for your family and future generations.
So are you curious to find out more? Last chance to sign up! Check it out here. And if you use code 28DAYS by January 30th, you can save almost 40% on your LOAD registration!
And please tell me… what do you do with all your photos? I’d love to hear : ) They can’t just live on your hard drive!
As always, thanks for stopping by. Have a joyful, creative, blessing filled day!
Live creatively!
xoxo,
/c
Connie Hanks Photography 
14 responses to “What do you do with all your photos? I wanna know!”
Having just moved from the U.S. to Chile, Raeski and I had to decide what to do with all those pre-digital photos. We both decided which ones we wanted to keep which were mostly of friends and family who have passed on. The next set we decided who would like them and gave them away away. The last set we tossed.
Digital photos are treated differently. I deleted any photo in the camera that looks blurry. Next I do the same at home on the larger screen. Then if there are duplicates (Wooly takes thousands of photos on a trip) I choose one or two with the best composition.
Next up is Lightroom where I take a very close look at each photo. If I decide I would print the photo on a metal I keep it. Finally, the photos that made the cut are saved to a second hard drive. As my collection has progressed I am seriously considering a backup service in the cloud somewhere.
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Wow, you have a wonderful system in place! Good for you!! You inspire me to be more diligent in my curating process : ) Thanks for sharing!!
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Good question…on the hard drive, blogs, sent to friends, calendars, and hopefully into some more photo books. Good gifts to my mother.
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Great question – I keep mine on the SD card – and I have plenty of them .. and I put them in small plastic pocket and label them. Before I burned them on to CD’s – but can’t be bother anymore. SD cards are cheap today. I think my little camera has taken about 78.000 cards in 6 years, more than enough. *smile
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That’s a dangerous question because I have a ridiculous system. My digital photos are on my hard drive, an external hard drive, and online at SmugMug (unlimited storage for $40 a year and I can download full resolution copies if my house burns down). Keeping photos on media such as DVD’s or flash drives isn’t sustainable because those media degrade with time. I’ve harped about this on my blog for a while 🙂
Like you, I believe in having hard copies to look at, whether they are photobooks or scrapbooks. I scrapbook my photos (slowly but methodically) and sometimes make photobooks for vacations. Simply put, someday someone will be able to look at my photos that are printed in a book without the need of a machine to help them decipher 0’s and 1’s. Digital media can get lost very easily! — signed the scrapbooker and archives student.
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I was just thinking the other night I need to make decisions regarding my pictures. I never thought of scrapbooking…wonder if nature pictures would fit into scrapbooking? Currently I have them on my camera, on my laptop and on a website.
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Good question about what to do with photos! Most are in shoe boxes, many digital ones on CDs, and I have a few scrapbooks… Tackling scrapbooks seems so overwhelming so I like the idea of a LOAD.
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I’m working on scrapbooks but it’s going to take forever!
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Believe it or not, I use something very simple to store my photos: a thumb drive (or two)! Here’s the thing, though. I have to put the thumb drives into envelopes cataloging the folders of pictures!!! I gotta find the cloud, I guess! http://ohtheplaceswesee.com
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Good question, my old photos are in a box and in albums rarely taken out of the cupboard, only when a bottle of red is opened and I’m telling my boyf what happened back-in-the-day. But recently I printed out a lot of our holiday pics from around the world and am going to decopage them onto 2 side tables so we can see them every day and relive the memories. Really like the LOAD idea, got me thinking…
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Oh, really good question. Sadly, mine live on our hard drive and do nothing! But thankfully these photo challenges and my blogs allow me to pull a few of them out to share. I can’t remember the last time I printed one. You have me thinking though, I may need to check out these sites!
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What an interesting question because we would be keen to hear what everyone else does too! Ours end up printed and put in sleeve albums, printed and framed, loaded onto our personal Facebook or on our blog. The unprinted ones sometimes get created into DVDs with music and captions to show family …
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Storage is the problem – thus blog and hard drives are my repositories.
I simply adore that picture of the dog and his little girl.
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Oh dear Connie – well you did ask!
Digital photos are culled (when discipline is strong), used for calendars, photo books and occasional posts on-line, and diligently backed up to a couple of external hard drives. On idle days, running them as a slideshow is great entertainment 🙂
Albums exist, but shoe boxes are quite useful for the pre-digital hard copies (think 50 years worth) The indexing is nowhere near as diligent 😦
Cheers
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