Do you still have them? If you do, do you stick pictures on it? I have tons of pictures when my D was young. Later after the smart phone came out, we don’t have many picture on print. I would still like to preserve pictures. What do you do? Do you have phone pictures developed?
I have a LOT of digital pictures that I have taken with my DSLR Nikon of the kids and other places. My plan is to create a ‘storybook’ for each kid so they can have it on their book shelf. There are online photo places like shutterbug that can make books for you. Groupon often has deals on shutterbug or like products.
I’m also going to do the same thing with my Mom’s recipes. I have all of them but I think my sister would like something from Mom, so I am going to scan them in and import them into a book, maybe add pictures of mom in the book.
Funny enough, we have two big plastic totes full of photos from pre-digital days and one of the things I asked for my upcoming birthday was a scanner so we can digitize these.
I am old fashioned and still order pints of pictures taken from phones, digital camera etc. and put them in a photo album. I may be the last person to do so. For some things (ex. big vacation) I’ll make an album on Snapfish. My thinking is that one day facebook will be replaced, technology will change and I’d like to have some hard copies of photos.
I like the photo books, too. They have the benefit of adding text/graphics, cropping, enhancing, all kinds of stuff. After exploring and playing around with many of the options out there, I like mixbook.com the best as I find the software the easiest and most intuitive.
I recently printed a few years’ worth of favorite photos. I have photo albums of the kids’ early years, but after getting a digital camera, realized we never got around to printing anything and really like being able to pull out an album. If the technology fails, at least we’ll have hard copies to enjoy. (I’ve been saving everything on flashdrives and a backup hard drive.)
My mom has been great about printing out photo books of every trip and family get-together for years. I’m thankful for her efforts! She uses Shutterfly and does a wonderful job.
I put pictures from the phone and camera on the PC, organized by year and have about 10 categories for each year. I regularly make prints and put them in the photo albums I keep by year.
I love this, and so do the kids. I keep them organized in the spare room, and I see them looking through them. Sometimes, I’ll grab one and bring it to the sofa and the family will share it together and laugh! Digital is nice, but nothing is like hard copies.
After I finished my picture project last fall, I made one of just DH and I in our college years together…we met as freshman and took lots of photos. DS1 made the comment he doesn’t like the phone pics because he’ll never have anything like that…too many on his phone and daunting of a thought to make picture albums. he said its a real shame. He also said he now wishes cell phones weren’t around, as he was looking at all the fun stuff we did…instead of our noses stuck in a phone. A very telling comment.
I used to do Creative Memories. My poor only child…I think almost every step of her childhood is documented to the 9th degree, ha!
I ditched the CM albums about eight years ago and started doing digital albums. I use Shutterfly and Mixbook but prefer Mixbook for the variety and style. They are sooo much thinner and so much easier to organize. You can type in the text and stories to go with the pages and the designs are so nice.
I generally will work on an album, complete it and then just wait for an online coupon. Both sites generally run 50% off coupons. Back in the day of the CM albums I’m sure with the album, pages, page covers, various stickers and paper AND the $$ for all those prints = at least $150+ an album. And then they are huge and storage is a problem.
These coffee table style books are thin and much cheaper and my family loves them.
Having hard copies sounds lovely. I have about 10 shoeboxes filled with my D’s early pictures.
I’ll drink a cold pint with you! 
@GMTplus7 anytime!!!
I have a relative who does a shutterfly book for special events. To be honest, they are very nice, can be done online with your digital pics. I’m not all that motivated.
I do print out special pictures…like graduations, etc.
But really…who needs a box or album of old birthday party pictures?
Oh, I don’t know thumper, I was working on the 4th album when I started the thread. It’s tedious work but I enjoyed looking at the photos. It brings back good memories. Without pictures, all I remember is how much work raising a child was.
@thumper1 …I can’t imagine doing a whole album of birthday party pictures! My shutterfly or Mixbook albums cover three years at a time with birthday parties, vacations, holidays, etc.
One thing I made sure to do over the years was to take pictures of normal life at the time and create a couple of pages out of those photos. Without those, I would have never remembered that at age 5 D liked to gather her stuffed puppies and play a game called “puppy store.” I took pictures of her stuffed animals, pics of her playing with them and wrote the story down about how she did this almost every day.
So when I’m 85 and suffering from Alzheimers I can look at the book and remember those days instead of looking at one picture and saying “what is D doing with the stuffed animals in this picture?” ha!
My husband used to be the family photographer and photo album creator. Once we went digital, he stopped and now it’s me. He hates that all we have is digital photos with no prints. I have been working on a photo book o 2015 for a few days and it is taking me HOURS.
I used to do Creative Memories as well, and I had some wonderful photo albums from when the kids were young. But I agree, they were expensive and they are quite large!
As we moved into the digital age I stopped doing that but here are things I have done to capture memories.
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Scanned every photo and negative I could find in the house and organized them by month, year and event on a hard drive (yes! I have a backup!) so I can find what I want fairly easily (as long as I have some idea what year it was!) As I take digital pictures (whether on my phone or my camera) I continue to add to this collection in the same organized manner. (This initial project took over a year, but keeping it up is much easier!)
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Converted every video (VHS or otherwise) into digital and organized as well on a hard drive. As I take video now I add to the collection.
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Created many montage videos. I created a class “yearbook” for both of my kids classes all through grade school. Also create one for my H since he’s a teacher and has many fun activities throughout the year. It’s fun for him to share with his kids at the end of the year. When my daughter was in theater I also recorded her shows. (Yes, these are also organized and saved to a hard drive as well)
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Created a few of the digital online books described by others (using Shutterfly or the like). I’m hoping to do this more (empty nest project) because I like the idea of having hard copies of stuff and telling a story. (I like this better than CM for all the reasons @carachel2 mentioned)
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Occasionally, I still print out a few photos if I want to display them in a frame around the house or on my desk at work.
We take tons and tons of pictures, more so now that everything is digital! I used to print out pictures and put them in albums - a huge floor-wall bookshelf in our family room is filled with albums from the last 25 years. Labeled, easy to find the picture you want! Love it. Starting from 2014, I decided to do photo books instead. I had earlier made photo books for all the big vacations/cruises, but 2014 was the first year for the photo books. Took me a long long time to finish it (ended up with two books instead of one!). Now, I have to attack 2015…
Makes for fabulous memories though - can’t tell you how many times we will all sit in the family room, going through some album or photo book and remembering the fun times…
The latest thing is that the kids will take a picture of the old photo from the album and either send it out via a message or post on facebook - so brings back memories! D just posted a picture of S when he was two - sitting on the kitchen floor with an open box of crackers, munching away happily!
^^. Your family sounds like ours. Mine will also take a picture from our albums. I love them! Something I do for just very social occasions is put the photos on DVD with music. It takes a long time, but my software is awesome! I’ve made 2, and get rave reviews!
One of my Ds was the Fattest Baby Ever Born. (10 lbs and not long - we didn’t see her neck until she was 3.) On one break from college, she was looking through the albums for Fat Baby pictures of herself to show her friends.