What Do You Do With Your Photos?

I’ll get back to the title question in a sec, but first check out this photo of my sister, her boyfriend and my adorable baby – it  makes me happy :)!

I still have lots of great photos from the trip to post, but I’m super tired tonight so I will be heading to bed early!

I thought I’d share some questions my friend Sara emailed me earlier today. I met Sara through my scrapbooking blog over 3 years ago and we still keep in touch! Lots of people have asked me one or more of the questions below, so I asked her if I could share my answers with everyone. Keep in mind: this is just how I’m doing things at the moment :).

How do you organize the pictures that you’ve taken?

I organize my photos in folders by year and then by month inside the year folder. Special trips or events with a large amount of photos get a separate folder inside the main folder.

What do you do with them?

Right now, since I’m not scrapbooking much, I am trying to blog about a lot things I will want to put in scrapbooks in the future. This way, I will have a record of some of my favorite photos and some journaling to go with them. It also helps keep my friends and family up-to-date.

From time to time I am also making Shutterfly photo books of specific trips or events.

At the end of each year I have also been making a Shutterfly book with my favorite photos from that year.

Do you print any??

I mainly print photos for gifts for other people these days, and I usually print a set for myself too for future projects. When I was scrapbooking a lot, I would only print photos as needed for projects, because I would just print them at home on my photo printer. Now that my printer has gotten old, we let the ink run out and didn’t buy more. I have gotten used to just uploading photos and ordering prints online to pick up at CVS, Target or Walmart. I guess we will get a new photo printer at some point and I will go back to my old method (that makes it easy to print out digital scrapbook papers too).

What kind of scrapping projects do you have?

I always have multiple ongoing projects!! I don’t think I will ever be “caught up” but that’s OK. I have some large 12×12 scrapbooks that get new pages added little by little. When I have time, I like to sit down and make a whole mini scrapbook over the course of a day or two. I make lots of “scrappy” gifts for others. But right now 99.9% of my scrapbooking is photo books because that’s what I have time for.

Hope this helps!!  So… what do YOU do with your photos??

Puzzle Storage Idea

Here’s one of those little ideas that just popped into my head and I’m so glad we started doing it – it’s been so helpful! Gabe loves to work on puzzles, and since you can find lots of cute ones for $1, we have plenty of them around. The problem was that the boxes they come in take up too much space and are awkward to bring somewhere (plus you run the risk of spilling the all the pieces if the box gets dropped). So here’s what we do: use scissors to cut the picture out of the top of the box, slide the picture into a Ziploc sandwich bag (facing out for easy viewing), and place the pieces in the bag behind the picture. This makes the puzzles much more compact, less likely to spill, and easy to take along on a trip. These puzzles are some new ones I put in Gabe’s travel binder for our beach trip!

At home we store the puzzles upright in a plastic bin, with the pictures all facing the same direction. This makes it simple to flip through the puzzles and choose which one to play with next. Hope this little tip can help somebody out, it works for us!