I take an unreal amount of photos. Like, so many. I’ve always loved to document everything and now I have the roomie and Penny trained to always be ready for a photo! Ryan has also gotten pretty good at making sure there are photos of me, too. But…where do all those photos go? Well, here’s how we enjoy them in print and sleep soundly knowing they’re saved digitally.
How We Preserve Our Memories PHYSICALLY
On our wedding day, I gave Ryan a photo book of all our greatest moments throughout the time we’d been together up until we got engaged. The kicker was that I hand-wrote captions and memories throughout to help us both remember all those amazing moments we’ve shared. Well, that went over very well.
We’re now committed to doing a photo book in the same style as that first one each year. Annually, I go through the thousands of photos we’ve taken and pick the best ones (it’s so hard). I then upload them all to Artifact Uprising and start putting together each page of the photo book without captions. I’m committed to Artifact Uprising for these because that’s what I used for the first one and it’s important to me that they match. 😂 I also really like Mixbook and Shutterfly for making photo books, though—any clean, simple layout works for me!
A photo book is an amazing way to make your memories tangible. My dad’s favorite gifts are the photo books we’ve made him of our family vacations and they are so fun to flip through! Personally, I love writing in the captions myself. I am so sentimental when it comes to handwriting and love seeing my mom’s handwriting in our family photo albums, so it’s fun for me to make the books that much more personal by spending time writing in our memories. Ryan can write his in, too, which I love. ❤️
As of now, we will continue making a single album for each year of our marriage. It’s kind of fun to measure time that way—especially since our anniversary is in January so it’s nearly a calendar year, too! Special books for big trips or occasions are still welcome, too, of course. I don’t plan to make individual books for our (future) children or scrapbooks, but to instead stick with our family albums. I’ll keep you posted if that changes as our family grows. ☺️
I should also note that we make a sincere effort to print photos and display them around our home. I often change them out seasonally, even!
How We Save Our Photos DIGITALLY
Thank God for the cloud, friends. It safely preserves our photos no matter what happens to the technology we use to take and view our photos. It makes me feel so comforted to know that when I inevitably spill coffee all over my laptop or drop it on my tile floor and kill it, my photos are still safe up in the cloud! I love that.
I have an iPhone and a Mac, so I’m fully committed to the Apple apps when it comes to keeping everything organized and backed up. The photos on my phone automatically sync to the Photos app on my laptop. From there, I’m able to pay $9.99/month for everything in that app–my nearly 42,000 photos–to be uploaded to iCloud automatically. On top of all of that, I do my best to regularly back up my laptop to an external drive.
Shutterfly, Mixbook, and Artifact Uprising are also major assets when it comes to storing our memories. Each of those annual albums I make involves a whole bunch of photos that define our year. I upload all of those photos to all three sites—even though I only make an album on one. As far as I can tell, there doesn’t seem to be an upload limit or time of expiration for anything you save to the sites. Plus, they’re free! Shutterfly is particularly easy to upload and organize in, I’ll say.
I hope this post is helpful to some of you needing encouragement to print photos/create photo books OR those that have been wondering how to keep their photos safe digitally. This is just what I’ve found works for our family. ☺️
P.S. For those that don’t know, I’m a wedding videographer so videos are wildly important to me. That’s a post for another day, but don’t forget to be taking home videos and backing those up, too!