As you can guess, I love taking photographs and I have thousands of them. It's important that we look after our photographs so that we don't lose them. When you have so many it feels so daunting to find an option to keep them safe. Here are 5 ways to look after your photographs.
Back them up
There are a few ways you can do this. For phones, you can connect your phone to a computer and copy them onto the hard drive or a portable hard drive. You can also use apps to automatically back up your phone to the cloud. Depending on how much space you need you may need to pay for more storage. Some have a basic plan for free but it's worth looking into each one and making sure that it does what you need. Some options include iCloud (for iPhone), Microsoft OneDrive (iPhone and Android) and Google Photos (iPhone and Android). The same thing applies for photographs taken on your camera. Make sure that you upload them to your computer. Back them up the same way you would your phone photographs either on hard drives or a cloud. There are so many options out there and I've only listed a few. Do an internet search to find one that suits you best.
Turn them into photobooks
Photobooks are a great way to create a collection of photographs in one place. You could create one for each year of your child's life, a family holiday, a special event like a big birthday or wedding and the list goes on. I've created one for the first 2 years of my son's life (I'm very behind as he's 4 and I haven't done any for my daughter yet) but he loves getting them out and looking at all the special times and people in his life. My mum creates one each year of our family and I absolutely love getting them. There are even companies like Once Upon that do the hard work for you. You just download the app, favourite the photographs you love and it creates it for you. If you want to have more design power there are companies like Photobook and Snapfish. Once again, these are just a few options so do your research for one that suits you.
Create a photo wall
This is a way of being able to rotate your photographs over time. As kids grow, special events happen and members added to the family, you can add photographs, take some down and swap them around. There are many different ways to do this and it can be as cheap or as expensive as you'd like. If you want a cheap option, you can get frames from places like Ikea and get the photographs printed at Kmart. There is nothing wrong with this at all. You might find that the frames might break as they're not the best quality and the photographs won't be as good as going to a professional printer. Framers and dedicated photography stores will have better quality frames. You can get creative with the frames and go for different sizes and colours. I have a photo wall in my studio and it's a great reminder of why I run my business.
Photo Albums
This may seem old school but still a great way to store photographs. It's inexpensive and is great fun to look through. I created small albums for my son to look through when he was little. It was a lovely way for him to become familiar with all our loved ones, especially the ones he didn't get to see very often. It was like a book with the characters being all his favourite people.
Create photo products with them
This isn't suitable for large amount of photographs but it's a nice way to have photographs around you and on things that you use everyday. They can also be sweet gifts. For Christmas one year we created mugs with a photograph of my kids. They were only 6 months old and 3 so we now look back on how little they were. Other things you can create are phone covers, key rings, bookmarks, tote bags and so much more. Places like Kmart, Big W and Officeworks have a whole list of products you can create.
What are the ways that you store and look after your photographs? I'd love to hear them.