Family Photos

drozio

Hi Everyone! I have been off this site for quite sometime, but for some reason I thought I should ask my question here! What do you do with all your family photos?! I am behind about 8 years (since I had my first kid!) and I am trying to decide what I want to do.... do you make photo books, do you print and put in albums, just on CD's, I want to hear what everyone is doing!

On top of that, if you have more then one kid, are you printing doubles so they have their own albums?! This is the crazy stuff I think about now that both kids are in school and I have more time. Curious what everyone does with their treasured photos! PLEASE HELP ME DECIDE WHAT TO DO!!! 

lovesclimbing

Our daughter was born last year, and a couple weeks before Christmas, I made a photo book on Shutterfly with photos from the last year and bought three copies - one for us and one for each set of grandparents, and we gifted it to them for Christmas. I got this idea from my cousin who does that for the grandparents in their family. I think it's really sweet, and both of our parents loved it.

I really really like Shutterfly photo books. I've had nothing but good experiences. In addition to this one, I have a wedding and engagement photo book from them, ordered our wedding invitations from a different company but part of the same organization, and have seen dozens of others. Shutterfly makes it super easy to make really nice looking books. You can pick a book design and just pop your photos into the existing layouts, or you can customize it further by resizing and moving around the photo layout, captions, etc. The different book designs come with specific options included. So all the elements like frames and fonts and colors and such all go together so the book is coordinated. Shutterfly always has a sale going on, so wait and eventually a 50% off all photo books sale will come along. I did the 8x12 book and got them for $20 apiece instead of $40 thanks to a sale.

 There are also other companies besides shutterfly that do this. My sister uses Mixbook and really likes it. She says it has more designs than Shutterfly. I've heard good things about Snapfish. Even Walmart has this service.

If you're into scrap booking, you can do this yourself. This is what my mom does. I also did some as a teen, but I don't have my own supplies, so this can be expensive to get started. At Joann's and other hobby stores, there are sets that are supposed to make it easy to scrapbook from a company called Project Life. You can also design pages, similar to shutterfly, through the Project Life app. A friend of mine does this and really likes it.

I think it's really nice to have something physical, no matter what service you use or how you do it. It's so nice to have that physical book to look through and grab and show to family and friends. I love it.