I get lots of questions about how to display and store photos so I thought I'd share what I do. First of all, we live in a smallish rental house with plaster walls. So not only are we limited on wall space, we're also limited on where we can hang things (because it's SO hard to get nails in these walls we've pretty much stuck with hanging things where there were already nails from previous renters). So, I do have photos on our walls, but not as many as I would like. Here are a few photos of my living room walls:
Nothing too original, but that's what I have right now. In the dining room, we have photos on shelves and the walls, and I also made a border with photos. The "border" is actually covering up a sloppy paint job that the last renters did and I didn't know about until I took down the ugly border that was up. I couldn't find a new border I liked, so I made my own. It's just a bunch of 4x6s and 5x7s glued up randomly around the top of the wall. I had to try a few different glues to get them to stick to our rough walls, and in the end, tacky craft glue (then kind in the bronze-ish colored bottle) worked best. All the photos from the border are from our
covered bridge summer.
And of course, the kids like their art to be displayed too. Our fridge door is full of random pictures and school papers, but their favorites usually go on a display we made with two curtain rods and some drapery clips.
I have a lot more ideas I've found online but don't have the space for right now. Here's a link to my
pinterest board if you need some more creative ideas.
So, obviously I take a TON of photos and can't possibly fit all my favorites on the wall but don't want them to just sit on my computer forever either. I used to do traditional scrapbooks...you know, with actual paper and glue and page protectors and all that. When we downsized to a smaller house, I had no space to keep all those supplies so I switched to digital and I LOVE it! Each kid gets their own scrapbook for each year (although I think I might start printing them every two years now). I design them all in photoshop (mostly using freebies I find at
craftcrave) and print them at
Blurb. It's SO much cheaper than regular scrapbooking, and even cheaper than printing each photo and buying albums. I love that they're all the same size but I can customize the covers however I want. Here are a couple of pages from Jack's first year scrapbook.
The plan is for the kids to take their scrapbooks with them when they get married, so I also make us a family album each year too. The family albums are not "scrapbooks" - there's not patterned paper or cute embelishments, just the pictures and sometimes words, depending on my mood when I design them. Sometimes the covers are a photo, sometimes I pick a pattern from my scrapbooking stuff. The layouts are pretty simple. Blurb has a ton of page layouts to use, or it's super easy to make your own (and you don't have to be a pro to use them...it's super easy!). So, this is how I fit roughly 2,500 pictures per year in about 4 or so inches of shelf space. Last year I made 4 family books - 3 for just regular everyday photos plus the kids' photoshoots, and another for our trip to Tennessee.
The books are just like the books my clients get for sessions, they're just bigger (8x10 instead of 7x7). They can print up to 420 pages, but I recommend staying under 300 or so. I have a couple that are at the upper page limit and the binding doesn't seem as sturdy on those.
Another really cool thing about Blurb is that they now offer iBooks versions of the photobooks. I like to have the actual books, and the kids like to look through them, but my husband prefers to look at them on his iPad. Right now, this is only available for iphone, ipad and ipod, but I've heard that Blurb is working to make it available for Android in the future too.
One more thing I do with my photos: make sure my files are backed up! I once had a hard drive crash when my daughter was a week old. I hadn't backed up her photos yet, so other than the few that I had already printed, I lost all the photos from her first week. I cried and cried, and even thinking about it now makes me super sad. So now I burn 2 DVDs of all photos plus upload them to www. unitprints.com once a month. I keep the second copy of the DVD at my dad's house in case we have a fire or flood.
