My current project – creating photo books to be printed. It is a HUGE project! Because of my digital camera I have taken more pictures than ever. Unfortunately, I have very little pictures actually printed. Thus my goal to at least get a few photo books. I was able to get a couple of good deals from Zulily not to long ago – an 8×8 20 page book for $10 and an 8×11 20 page book for $15 courtesy of Shutterfly. Those have to be ordered by the end of May. I also received a voucher for a free 8×8 20 page book from my credit card to be redeemed at Shutterfly by June 9th.
Those books are on hold though because I am busily, hurriedly trying to get all of last year’s photos together in a 100 page book. They are on sale at Winkflash for only $25! But it ends today {Tuesday, May 21}. The sale has been extended until next Tuesday, May 28th!! Use code: ALLBOOKS. Normally 100 page photo books are over $100 so this is a terrific deal. I am kicking myself for not being on top of my photo organization though. It is taking way too long to sift through all those pictures.
Which prompts me to ask you, do you organize your photos? Do you regularly print them out? Or are you like me and have a gazillion stored on your hard drive with only a few actually printed out? If you do print yours out what’s your secret for keeping on top of it?
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I put all my photos on disc for each hear. As far as printing…I put a lot on a personal blog and then write about the pictures and journal so to speak, and print it in a blog book through BookSmart which I LOVE! I also scrapbook them using smilebox or photoshop to have actual scrapbook pages {instead of all my journaling to look at} and also print through Blurb {Booksmart}.
I am currently trying to get my photog blog from last year into a book by Blurb. I’m so OCD about how it should look it is taking forever to get it done.
Be careful about storing on disks as they don’t hold up over time and you could lose what is on them. Get flash drives or memory cards instead! After I heard this, I told a friend and when she checked her disks, her son’s first year’s disk was not usable (he was about 5 at the time). Luckily between her friends and parents, she didn’t really lose anything!!
I found this on pinterest recently and it has helped me become more motivated to organize my pictures. They have been on the to do list for a while. I organize my digital photo’s similar to her in that I have a folder for the year and for each month and then sometimes a folder for a holiday or an event. Rarely do I take the time to mark each photo though. I also did a pinterest search on organizing pictures. There was another site that was pretty good but unfortunately I can’t seem to find the pin. I sure hope it is ok to post this here. If not just delete my comment 🙂
http://www.jenthousandwords.com/2012/01/organising-photographs.html
Lisa
Oh wow! This is how I need to do mine. A little at a time each month and then bam! done by the end of the year. Thanks you so much for the link!
I at least try to stay on top of having the pictures organized into folders on my computer. I promptly delete photos I know I won’t want and only keep the best. (Which may include a few funny and weird photos of course!) I make sure they are organized in folders by year and then month. Then if I ever get around to actually printing any out I will have them ready to go.
Recently, my sister came up with the brilliant plan to use the Mixbook site to make a book for our Mother for her Mother’s Day gift. We do a book every year with a 2-page spread for each grandchild that our mom can have for a “brag book” sort of thing. I am no good with photo shop and haven’t made much headway with digital scrapbooking yet, but this was so easy! They already had themes and cute little buttons and ribbons and such you could just plop on the page. The four of us who had children in the book were all able to sign into Mixbook and make our own pages for our kids. Then we shared the cost and had the book made and gave it to my mom and she has loved it! It was so easy that someone like me who is not computer savvy could even do it.
I organize my pictures into files for year – then in the 2012 folder is a folder for January, February, etc. At the end of the year, I make a photobook through Picaboo (they are higher quality than Shutterfly and Winkflash, but their software is making me mad, so I am moving toward different book makers like Heritage Makers and another one I can’t remember the name of.) Then… I don’t know. I have like 3 years of pictures I am done with but I don’t know what to do with them. I will probably stick them on an external harddrive and forget about them for 100 years. Sounds good.
My mother in law prints the billions she takes and gives to me. I save the two or three that I love and let the kids scrapbook the rest. It takes me forever to scrapbook with themes and punches and whatnots but the kids are like cut, glue, stickers, done. I love it. They love pouring back over their work. I love that its done. My oldest is nine so you can guess the level of expertise we are dealing with. But still, I am so glad we do it this way.
My younger ones like to scrapbook their photos too! I will occasionally print some out for them to do.
I organize by year and then by month too, usually with Easter or someone’s birthday having their own folder within that month. I try to print off a family photo album for each child for Christmas, but money’s been tight for the past, oh, nine years, so sometimes it doesn’t get done. I use Snapfish (HP), but it’s nothing fancy. I like how they have layouts and templates so I can just put in my pictures and caption them as I like. I hope to make baby photo books for my kids when that magical day happens that we have “more money.” Ha! We keep having more kids, so that day isn’t likely to happen very soon. 🙂 I also try to upload my favorite pics to my Snapfish account every two or three months so in case our desktop crashes, the good pics are accessible elsewhere, but I think you already do that with your photo blog. You are so much more tech savvy than I, I feel silly telling you what I do. 🙂
What a great deal from Winkflash! Can you tell us which size photo book this deal is for? Thanks for sharing!
Its for the 8×11 books. I am SO GLAD the deal has been extended. I only got half of last year done {I’m at 52 pages} so now I have time to finish last year’s and have it all in one book. YES!
I take forever because I use my own templates with photoshop then upload those instead of uploading all my pictures and trying to create pages right on Winkflash or Shutterfly etc.
Awesome! Thank you for the information.
It’s definitely a great deal. I’m sure your pages are amazing. Best wishes finishing your book!
I am so old school you would laugh! When I upload my pix, I file them by month under a master folder for each year. Once the year is done, I spend time picking through them and print one whole year at a time – usually through shutterfly. Then I sit and make 12×12 albums by hand. I don’t do a lot of frilly or over the top layouts. I pick one accent color of paper, add pictures and write lots of stories or memories. While digital albums are all the rage, I have stuck to paper. I spent so much of my working years staring at a computer screen, doing my hobby on computer was unappealing. Paper albums do take longer – I’m two years behind! Also, I do one main family album and everything goes in there. If, as adults, my children want their own copies, they can haul their butts to office max and make them!
I organize mine by month.
I print off some (not all) of my pictures every 2 weeks b/c I’m doing Project Life.
It’s been the best way for me to get pictures off my hard drive and into physical form so my daughter & I can enjoy them and look through them.
Plus, I love having the journaling in my own handwriting to go along w/ the pictures.
I’m a HUGE FAN of Project Life b/c it’s so easy and quick and simple.
I’m current and up to date w/ printing pics and journaling b/c of Project Life.
I’ve heard a little bit about project life. Maybe I should look into it more.
I have a bajillion on my hard drive. I’ve done a photo book, and I’ve done regular scrap books. The rest sits in the hard drive.
I am crazy OCD organized with my digital photos. For me, it’s all about file names. I organize by year (folder is named 2013), then by month (folders named 2013_01, 2013_02, etc.), then within each month’s folder are all the photos taken that month. Each photo has a unique file name that identifies exactly when it was taken. It looks like this: 2013-05-22_13-33-16 which translates to YEAR-MONTH-DAY_HOUR-MINUTE-SECOND (hours are by military time). Sound overwhelming? Have no fear, I use a free photo browsing software to rename all my photos! It is called cam2pc. You can use cam2pc to download the photos off your camera and automatically rename them all in one step.
Sometimes I will make a sub-folder within a month for a single event (like a wedding) if I took a lot of pictures, but each photo is still in order by the fancy filename.
Oh, and I can’t emphasize enough the importance of BACKING UP your photos!! I would absolutely DIE if I lost them, and it’s just one hard-drive failure away. We use an automatic online backup system. It is a must.
So what backup system do you use?
Crash plan
This has nothing to do with digital photos though I really need to organize mine as well. I have a homeschool question for you. I am pondering whether to use teaching textbooks or Saxon math in the upcoming grades (4th and 8th. We have primarily used Saxon but the past two years I allowed my almost 13 yr old to use Teaching textbooks. He loves it but I worry that it may not be as through as Saxon. Any thought? I already have all the Saxon series except Geometry so financially that is easy but I am an English person not math…any input would be appreciated greatly! And way to go with mother of the year!
I haven’t used Teaching Textbooks before but I have heard great things about it. We used Saxon with the D.I.V.E. cds for the older grades which really helped a lot. Not much help, am I?
LOL you are very helpful, I had not heard of D.I.V.E before and am going to do a bit more research before I give up on Saxon. Hope you are enjoying your adventure overseas:)
I love posts like this. I also organize by year and month. I use Lightroom which lets me tag every picture (and edit) for quick searches. I use an online backup service as well as a double external hard drive system. (I shoot in raw which takes up TONS of room so I don’t put my photos on my computer hard drive.) I have made one yearbook sized book using Blurb (for 2009). It is about 400 pages long with lots of pictures and print and only cost about $85. But I am woefully behind on the rest. My goal is to finish selecting my favorite pictures and burn cd’s of them for my kids and make books for them (smaller ones than the first one I made.) My goal is to have archive backups on cd’s (I do but not after 2010 when my photo files got HUGE–the year of my DSLR.) I know that I am somewhat OCD but this system (once set-up) works really well and with minimum of effort and I would DIE if I lost my photos in a crash! 🙂
I do use an external hard drive to store all my photos. And another hard drive for my other files. Hardly anything is actually stored on my computer. What online backup do you use?
I love posts like this. I also organize by year and month. I use Lightroom which lets me tag every picture (and edit) for quick searches. I use an online backup service as well as a double external hard drive system. (I shoot in raw which takes up TONS of room so I don’t put my photos on my computer hard drive.) I have made one yearbook sized book using Blurb (for 2009). It is about 400 pages long with lots of pictures and print and only cost about $85. But I am woefully behind on the rest. My goal is to finish selecting my favorite pictures and burn cd’s of them for my kids and make books for them (smaller ones than the first one I made.) My goal is to have archive backups on cd’s (I do but not after 2010 when my photo files got HUGE–the year of my DSLR.) I know that I am somewhat OCD but this system (once set-up) works really well and with minimum of effort and I would DIE if I lost my photos in a crash! 🙂
I’ve started attempting to do a collage of photos on picmonkey.com after a day out or a spring break, etc. and then hope to be able to easily insert the one jpeg file into a big album at the end of the year. I sort my photos into folders by year and season. I also print some to slip into one of those photo albums with the 5 slots per page that requires no work except occasionally catching up on ordering photos when they are doing sales at places like snapfish.