Upon watching this video for the first time, my brother-in-law said, “it looks like there’s nothing wrong in the world.” This video was filmed in June 2020 when, to be clear, there were many things wrong in the world (as there always are). But isn’t it a gift to give our little ones a world that is safe and good and kind and lovely? To imprint on them the things we hope they’ll seek out for themselves, and create for other people, for the rest of their lives? I think so. Consider this volume of our annual video a compilation of everything good in our world. I hope you enjoy a peek at our life together!
Though I was glad to have our photos organized (and VERY glad to have them backed up), the real culmination of my photo organization project was this: making printed photo albums of our life together. You all know how important family stories are to me, and having an actual book to look through to help us tell those stories was the next logical step – and to me, well worth the time and expense.
In turning to the project of family photo albums, my first decision was at what interval to print them. The vast majority of people seem to do yearly albums, but to me that seemed a bit excessive when I considered the full span of our (hopefully long) life together. Do I really want to have 60 photo albums on a shelf one day? While I would be exceedingly grateful to have 60 years of memories, I don’t think I need 60 albums.
I settled on one album for every five years, beginning with the year we began dating (our senior year of high school). The first album would run 2005-2009, the second, 2010-2014, the third, 2015-2019, and on from there. I readily admit the editing is only going to get harder in the thick of these family years, but I like that a five-year boundary forces me to focus on the best, most poignant, and most illustrative memories. The albums will be heftier than they would be if we were to do annual albums, but in a more concise package!
With our photos organized and the interval set, I found myself procrastinating on making that first album earlier this year. It took me a bit to figure out why, but I eventually realized: I was afraid of missing something. Unlike a folder on a computer or a blog post, I can’t just go back and make an edit if I realize I left out an important event or a killer shot a few months down the road. That was paralyzing!
What eventually tipped me over the edge? I believe it was one of you who posed the question: wouldn’t you rather have 95% of your memories and favorite photos in book form as opposed to 0%? When framed that way, the answer, of course, was and is yes. While not perfect, I also realized I could always slip loose photos into the album pages down the line if I later found a gem that HAD to be included.
To help ease my mind, I did send a quick query to a few friends and siblings who I knew might have snaps from our earliest years together, in the hopes of gathering up any loose ends. I also scrolled through old Facebook albums to download anything I could find that wasn’t already accounted for. Finally, I had a few dozen printed photos from high school and college that I didn’t have digital copies of, so I brought them to a local photo store to scan.
With my photos at the ready and my mind at ease, it was time to begin designing! But which photo album company to choose? Though I love the idea of using the same company for all of time, I quickly realized that was a bit silly: who knows which company will be in or out of business in 25 years?! So, I made the best choice I could for this first album, and am keeping my mind open for future albums.
For our 2005-2009 album, I chose Artifact Uprising. AU has an excellent reputation and we had used them for our parent wedding albums with great results, so they were my natural first choice. I chose the Hardcover Photo Book, 8.5×8.5″ size, in Midnight Blue, with 50 base pages and a total of 64 pages. It came out to just over $100 with a promo code. Though I’m happy with the end result, there were pros and cons.
What I loved about Artifact Uprising hardcover photo albums: — It would be hard to make an ugly album, even if you don’t fancy yourself a designer. Their layout options are simple and classic. — The album itself is great quality, and I loved the color options for the cover fabric.
What I did not like about the AU hardcover photo albums: — When centering text on the cover, there was no way to tell whether it was perfectly centered (heck, they even have guides on Instagram!). — The most number of photos allowed on a page is four. While I appreciate the restraint of their layouts, there were some events where I really wanted to have a grid of smaller photos, as in our wedding album. — I would really have preferred to have had an embossed title right on the fabric cover, but that’s only an option in their layflat albums (which didn’t feel right for this book; they’re also more expensive). I’m the type of person who takes dust jackets off books because I find them annoying, but if I did that with this album, it would just be blank. — Not knowing how many pages I would ultimately end up with, it was hard for me to choose the base number of pages and make sure I was getting the best deal. — You can only move spreads of pages around within the book, not individual pages. — It told me a BUNCH of my photos were too low res, which I found insulting, ha! While I appreciate the caution, they seemed to print just fine.
Though the list of cons is longer than the pros, I’m really happy with how our Artifact Uprising album turned out! We’ve loved having it out and flipping through it with the kids (June really likes the picture of me on a carousel, ha!). If you have any questions at all, I’m happy to answer!
For our second album, I’m considering a few other album companies, including Milk Books (who printed our wedding album!), Shutterfly, and Mix Book. If you’ve had experience with any of them, I’d love to hear!
This is also the last post in this photo organization series, so if I left any questions unanswered, ask away! So glad to have these out in the world, and I hope they’ve been helpful!!
If I had to guess, I imagine most of the people who’ve messaged me over the years asking for help with their photos were interested in this part of the process: digital photo organization. It’s awfully overwhelming, isn’t it? We take SO! MANY! PHOTOS! these days! It’s kind of shocking to compare the number of photos I took ten or even five years ago and the number I take now. (For example, we have 1,000 photos backed up from 2014, and 6,000 from 2019!) Of course, I had two adorable children in that time, which certainly doesn’t help.
I do feel like I’ve gotten my arms around the situation, though, and I’m happy to lay things out for you today. The good news? It’s not hard! You can totally get your photos organized, and set up a system to keep them organized going forward. The bad news? In my experience, it’s a looooooooong, tedious process. Little by little, though, you’ll get there!
Here are the steps I took to get our digital photos under control.
Step 1 | Choose a photo back-up system. Though the actual organization of our photos has been great, this first step of backing them up was by far the most important to me. If you do nothing else while reading these posts, take this action! After considering various options, we chose to back up our photos with Amazon Photos. Unlimited photo storage is included with your Prime membership; we chose to pay $20 more a year to get 100 GB of video storage, as well.
The system is super easy: download the Amazon Photos app, and every night you’re connected to Wi-Fi it will automatically upload your photos to your Amazon account. You can view them in the app or on a desktop through your Amazon account.
A really wonderful aspect of this solution is that both my and John’s phone photos back-up to the same account, so all of our photos are consolidated in one place.
Though Amazon gives you various options to organize your photos (folders, etc.), we don’t bother with any of that. I consider Amazon our “peace of mind” back-up, so I pretty much just let it run in the background and do its thing, knowing that my photos are secure no matter what happens to my phone. Hallelujah!
Step 2 | Order an external hard drive for secondary back-up For precious photos, one back-up isn’t enough! Next, I put in place a system to make sure our favorite photos were narrowed down and neatly organized. Whereas Amazon is storing the outtakes, random photos the kids take, and all 158 angles of back-to-school photos, the hard drive is reserved for the favorite and best. Now, if in a few years I’m looking for the best photos from, say, June’s first soccer season, I’ll know right where to go!
Step 3 | Create a hierarchy for your hard drive This is your standard system to keep things organized. Mine is Personal Photos -> Year –> Month –> Event. An event is any occasion with more than 1-3 photos – it could be as momentous as a birthday party or as small as a weekend hike. Some months have 1-2 events and others have 8-10. If there are stand-alone photos from the month that don’t belong in any event, I’ll give them a descriptive file name so I can find them easily when scanning folders later.
This is what it looks like in practice:
And here’s what it looks like inside a month and an event:
Step 4 | Centralize all “random” digital photos onto new hard drive This step may or may not apply to you, but I had a few older external hard drives, folders on my computer, and CDs/USBs with photos that I needed to consolidate into my new system. This included sorting them into the right event folders and editing/culling them as necessary.
Step 5 | Month by month, sort, cull, and edit photos into hard drive system Ah yes, the step that took me two years :) Oh so slowly, I went month by month through 14 years of photos, using a Google doc to keep track of my progress. (It went on like this for 170 lines!)
For each month, these are the steps I took: — Download the photos from that month from Amazon Photos — Sort photos into events, creating new event folders as necessary — Go through each event folder and delete outtakes, unimportant photos, and multiples until I’m left with the best and favorite photos from that event. — Edit remaining photos as needed (using either Photoshop on my computer, or PicTapGo on my phone) — Name any stand-alone photos — Manually delete the photos from my phone
Whew!! It’s simple — but depending on your backlog, it can be a lengthy process. Each month, I’d tackle a year or two (the later years took MUCH longer). Now that my backlog is complete, I sit down every quarter or so to sort, cull, and edit the photos from the past few months.
Organizing my digital photos teed me up for the final step in my photo organization project: creating photo albums! That’s what I’ll cover in the final post in this series.
Friends, I’d love to hear: was this helpful? If you have a system for organizing your digital photos, is it similar to mine? Or do you do something even more brilliant? :)
At the end of March, I wrote a reflection on our first two weeks of quarantine. It was the beginning of spring and the beginning of an alternate reality that, though we didn’t know it at the time, would still largely be our reality many months later.
And here we are, many months later. While so many aspects of our life remain in that shifted state – masks on, sanitizer at the ready – a significant milestone took place this week when our kids returned to preschool after five and a half months at home. With that, an acute season of our life closed, and I wanted to record a few more reflections here.
I’ve often said that one of my least favorite things in life is trying to work when my children are around. I hate it. It leaves me exhausted and irritable, feeling like I failed at being both a parent and an employee, and since becoming a mom I have put structures in place to avoid it whenever possible. I like to think I’m not a distracted parent, and perhaps that’s why trying to do focused work on my computer while my children are clamoring for my attention feels so icky and alien to everything I try to cultivate in our family life.
Even aside from my life as a parent, I think it’s the Enneagram 5 in me that makes me highly value compartmentalizing my work life and my personal life, and wrapping things up cleanly before I transition from one to the other. (Trying to do something for work on my phone while my kiddos are in the room is literally the stuff of nightmares for me.)
Anyway. All that to say that after our preschool closed, John and I knew attempting to juggle two (almost) full-time jobs with no childcare was simply not an option for us – something in our work would have had to give if we couldn’t have come up with a childcare solution. Thankfully, we did. For five months, we welcomed two of our favorite high school neighborhood babysitters into our home from 9-noon almost every weekday morning. Angels, both.
Was it a risk? Absolutely. Was it a risk that was personally worth taking for our family? Absolutely. We took all the precautions we could and we are so thankful that everyone stayed healthy throughout. The kids had great mornings (mostly going in the backyard splash pad or playing camping/sleepover/pet school :)), we ate lunch together as a family, then nap time/Big Girl Quiet Hour got us through most of the rest of my work day.
(That last hour, of course, was often the worst, as I battled feelings of not having gotten enough done during the day while attempting to wrap things up and meet the needs of kiddos who had spent the day in proximity to us but often not gotten the attention they wanted from us.)
Still, many (MANY) had it much harder than us. Still, we found the sweetness.
Before it got too hot, we ate lunch in our backyard every day – a revelation to eat as a family in the middle of the week! June snuggled up next to me and colored on a few Zoom calls. John no longer had a commute, buying us back an hour of every day.
Outside of work, we did many of the things we are accustomed to doing – backyard s’mores, back-of-the-car picnics, hikes in the woods, neighborhood walks, Saturday morning chocolate croissants – but they were all suddenly imbued with a certain nobility and solidarity: these things are keeping other people safe! We’re doing our part in an awful situation!
We tried new things. I don’t think the male members of my family will ever go back to getting their hair cut professionally. (I certainly will, ha!)
We became closer to other school parents as we texted updates, commiserated, and set up Zoom playdates. This felt like a really big step forward in these relationships, and one that would have been unlikely to happen otherwise.
We indulged in curbside pick-up at basically every business we frequented – what felt like a special luxury as a parent juggling multiple car seats.
We connected with friends in new ways: trading book stacks when the libraries closed, Zooming with high school friends across the country, and signing on for virtual game nights.
And in a revelation that might be one of the longest-lasting, we discovered the beauty of taking ordinary days off from work. Early on, John and I thought we’d help cover childcare until preschool resumed by taking alternating Fridays off (lol to that). These ordinary days of having little adventures together, one parent and two kids, were so sweet. Traditionally, my vacation days have been reserved for travel and big events, but I’m looking forward to scheduling more of these days going forward.
So: week one of preschool in a pandemic — complete. While I never really understood the memes that circulated this spring about suddenly appreciating teachers so much more (maybe it’s having grown up with two teachers, but I already knew exactly how much teachers should be appreciated!!), I am SO thankful that our kids are able to be back in school. (And of course, as grateful as ever for their wonderful teachers.) Sending all my best wishes and compassion to those who are facing harder falls, for whatever reason. xoxo
