How do you preserve photos for your kids?

[ejchase]

Hi All,

This question might belong better in the organizing thread, but it seems like a family issue too.

I'm a new mom with hundreds of photos from the last seventeen months on my computer, and I'm wondering how best to organize them and save them for my seventeen-month-old daughter. As a generation Xer, the concept of just having them saved on my computer seems somehow .... anti-social, yet photo albums seem old-fashioned and the photo books you can get made on Shutterfly seem a little impersonal.

We do have a Shutterfly site up which we use to share photos with faraway family and friends. And we will frame some pictures to put around the house, but I kind of liked having photo albums around the house growing up.

Would love to hear how the rest of you have shared old photos with your kids as they have grown and in what form you plan to leave those photos behind for them.

Many thanks in advance,
Elizabeth

[Mrs-M]

I'm locked in time, so old-fashioned picture photo album books it is for my kids. Digital picture organization and storage started happening (in our house) roughly ten years ago, after receiving a digital camera from my parents for Christmas one year, but what we have in the way of digital pictures and memories pales in comparison to what we have in the way of old-fashioned photos.

It's so nice to be able to pull-out the albums (and we do) and go through the years. I have all of the original negatives in the event of a loss (heaven forbid).

[Rosemary]

I've done a couple of different things. For newer photos, every time I download from my camera to my computer, I select the best photos and copy them to a separate directory named "2012 book" or whatever year it is. In the late fall every year I upload all the photos in that directory to an online photo site and create small books - same book, copy for us and for each set of grandparents. Christmas gift, done. Advantage of these books is that you can add a fair amount of text.

But I think that prints have far better resolution, so I also get prints made and keep those in simple photo albums, the kind with 4x6 pockets, photo-safe. It's easy to remove the photos if we need to and it takes minutes to put an album together. I've tried a fancier scrapbook and it is just not for me.

[mara61]

If you don't have those photos backed up onto a disk or an external hard drive, I really recommend you do it.

I have a shutterfly site which I share with some people. I've been making a summer album the last few years of the highlights of the summer and order when I can get it for free. I do make actual albums to, but I scrapbook (well I used to, been a while). I don't like the pictures just plain in a flip album, I know it works for some but I like a little story behind them. After having to sort through my parents photos that were like that, with no information on them I really had to guess who was who and why was the picture taken.

[creaker]

A while back I found a massive pile of negatives from our past (our kids were little in 80's - early 90's) - I haven't done much recently, but I had picked up a low end negative scanner (not good enough for 8 x 10's, but definitely good enough for standard size prints and posting in Facebook. I scanned in 100's of them, tried to sort the best I can. Trying to get up the courage for another round :-) But my kids like them.

The best advice I can give is organize - a big pile becomes a very confusing pile over the years, whether it's hard or virtual media. The easy ones I had were from before I was married to a while after because I was more of a shutterbug and had my negatives in sheets and dated. The later ones are just in photo envelopes, a major mess.

[pcooley]

I'm 46, so I still use a film camera for most important events. I have many more photos on the computer, but I don't think about them as being anything that will last very long. The 35 mm camera is our camera of record.

Of course, I also have a shelf of empty photo albums, and a desk drawer full of photos. At least they are physically there.

Occasionally, I think of having our digital photos printed, but it seems to be far too much trouble. Film is less work.

[Gardenarian]

Like Rosemary, I gather our best pics and create a photo book every year.

I use Snapfish; during the holidays there is usually a time when they lower the price to around $10. This seems like a really good deal to me, for a hardcover, 20 page book. You can include comments (we tend to put in lots of text), and we have also scanned and added dd's artwork, award ribbons & certificates. You can make a longer book for (I think) $1 per page.

So far there has been no yellowing or fading of the books - but I should do some checking and make sure these things will last!

I really love looking back on these books, and I am so glad that dd will have these mementos of her childhood!

[Tussiemussies]

Like Rosemary, I gather our best pics and create a photo book every year.

I use Snapfish; during the holidays there is usually a time when they lower the price to around $10. This seems like a really good deal to me, for a hardcover, 20 page book. You can include comments (we tend to put in lots of text), and we have also scanned and added dd's artwork, award ribbons & certificates. You can make a longer book for (I think) $1 per page.

So far there has been no yellowing or fading of the books - but I should do some checking and make sure these things will last!

I really love looking back on these books, and I am so glad that dd will have these mementos of her childhood!

Sounds better than scrap booking!!!

[ToomuchStuff]

I just am chiming in to add, make sure you mark your photo's. I have some from my grandfather, that I only know who one relative is, due to a couple of photo's and I have no idea the name of her, or the name of the guy that owned the circus, she married the owner of. When my grandmother passed away (my grandfather died when I was little), most of them went away, since no one had a clue who they were.

That said, in between now, and when your daughter is old enough to want them, every photo you have taken that is in digital format, and still have (via failures of the media) will be able to fit on something the size of a watch battery.

[Alan]

With the advent of my first digital camera, some years ago, I've struggled with just how to store and protect the thousands of pictures I've deemed essential. The best method I've been able to come up with is to create descriptively named/dated folders and then store all the pics on multiple devices.

I always download the pics onto my laptop, then copy them to a home file server as well as to a 2 Terrabyte portable drive. Then, just to be sure, about every 6 months or so I burn everything onto DVD's which I then store at work.