Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Digital pictures... what to do??

What do you do with your digital photos?  Do you still print photos and keep a photo album, or just look at pictures on your computer, and print off the odd one or two to put in frames or give to a relative?  Do you make photo books online and have them printed?

I'm asking these questions (and I'd love to hear your responses) because I'm having a bit of a dilemma with what to do with my photos.  Since getting our first digital camera about 6 years ago, I've been pretty good at keeping on top of printing pictures and putting them into photo albums (not every picture I take gets printed, but quite a few do).  I don't scrapbook, but I do have organized albums, and I usually write the date and the names of any non-family members pictured on the back of each photo.  Or perhaps I should say that I was pretty good at keeping on top of things.  It's now been about a year since I've printed pictures for my photo albums.  I've printed the occasional picture to frame or put in a baby book or give to family, but I haven't done pictures for my albums since the beginning of last September.  That's a lot of pictures to go through now!

I'm wondering, though, whether I should keep printing pictures and doing albums or if I want to switch over to making a photo book for each year instead (I would then still print pictures to finish off last year's album, but not print pictures from this year).  I've made a photo book for each of our family vacations, and one for each of the kids' first year, and I really like the finished result.  I'd love to make one of our wedding photos some day, but I need to get the negatives scanned first!  We got married just before digital took off. :P  The kids love looking through those books (at first I was quite anal about them, and then decided that they were meant to be looked through and enjoyed, even if it meant the pages got a little creased), and I like that they're easier to handle than a big album (and a photo won't fall out!).  However, I wonder if I'll regret not printing pictures?  If I did photos in a photo book, I wouldn't be able to write on the back of the photos with date/subject info (and it would likely get cumbersome and cluttered to caption each photo with that info).  And if I no longer have a photo album, what would I do with all those photo thank you cards and birth announcements and Christmas cards that I receive?  I always stick those in the back of my photo album each year.

So there's my little dilemma (I know, what problems I have :P).  I want to have some actual photos that I can touch and look at, because it's just not the same for me to gather the kids 'round the computer and look at pictures and reminisce.  But what's the best way to go??  Your thoughts???  If you do photo books, what's your favorite place/site to do them?

2 comments:

tammi said...

Or, you could do like me and just save them all on a flashdrive. I so rarely look through our old photo albums and so I figure it's no different if I suddenly get nostalgic to just pop a stick into the computer and browse. Of course, showing off to others is a little trickier then, but hey, that's what the blog and FB are for!

Andrea said...

I have this same problem too.

I definitely can't just keep them on my computer to look at...I *have* to have them physically in my hands somehow - but yeah, photo albums or photo BOOKS? They both have their pros and cons. I think I'm leaning towards photo books (provided I can get good deals on them through things like groupon coupons!) but then again, I don't write dates and names on the backs of my photos like you do.

Although part of me wants to keep at least SOME things "old fashioned"...so actually having photos in photo albums might be hard to give up.

Oh the dilemma!!!