How To Preserve Cherished Family Memories

No matter what the calendar says, it’s time to begin to unpack the 1001 pictures you took over the summer. These are now cherished memories, which through the magic of your mobile phone or tablet (or even D-SLR camera), you captured just in time. You can now relive all this summer fun whenever you want – but first you have to sort them out into some type of order.

Storing and Presenting Your Pictures

When it comes to how to store your pictures so that you can show them to people, you should consider photo boxes and digital photo albums.

• Folio boxes are a neat way to store your pics and present your favorites at a moment’s notice. You can customize your box with a favorite image. You can also choose from a wide variety of fabrics and even faux leather. The inside lining can be either black or white. A matching ribbon will make it easy to pull up anything you’ve stored. This enhances the presentation of treasured memories, making beautiful keepsakes for the rest of your life.

• A digital photo book makes it easy to replicate the joy you experienced when you thumbed through family photo albums. If you remember, these prints were inserted under transparent sticky sheets. However, in the course of time, these lost their stickiness and pictures fell out as soon as you opened the album. It also took a lot of time to create pleasing layouts. Sometimes, it took days. A digital photo album does away with these problems. Using a photo-sharing service, you can create a book for all your favorite memories in an hour or two. You don’t need the skills of a magazine layout designer to get the pictures just right, and it’s remarkably inexpensive. You also have a lot of flexibility. You can change how many pictures you have on each page. You can change your mind on how you want to do your layout. You can add some snappy captions. There is a lot more you can do with a digital photo album than with the traditional paper-based album.

Safeguarding Your Pictures

Back up all your pictures! You’ve spent a lot of time capturing pictures of your favorite experiences and you don’t want to have to face the heartbreak of losing them. You want to make sure that you have copies of all your photos. The logical way to do this is to backup everything.

There are many ways you could lose your pictures:

•   If they aren’t offloaded from your phone or tablet, they could get lost if there is any damage to the device.

•   You could misplace your photo book.

•   The online company hosting your digital photo album could go out of business.

There are two excellent strategies for safeguarding your pictures:

•  Redundancy. Make multiple copies of all your pictures.
•  Geographical distribution. Don’t store them all on the same backup device or cloud.

Editing

Even professional photographers have a lot of flops and repeat shots. They also take some awful pictures that make you wonder what they were thinking. So you’re not alone. Capturing the perfect picture is like getting the perfect date. You may have to date a lot of duds before you can find the right one. Some pictures can be redeemed, just crop out disturbing backgrounds or fix red eye.

Sharing

Naturally, you want to share them, and there are many ways to do it. You can share them online. You can share them by making prints. And you can share them through multimedia.

• You can share your pictures online by posting them to a photo-sharing site. You don’t have to share them all, just the ones you like, and the way to select between what you want to share and what you want to keep for your own amusement is through the privacy settings.

• Although we live in an increasingly digitized world not everything has to be paperless. You can print some of your digital pictures through an online service. You can also use an inkjet printer to print them out at home.

• You can present your pictures through a slideshow. You can even go one step further and make a video of your slideshow. Using a multimedia approach gives you the option to arrange how they will be viewed, and you can add captions or add audio commentary. If you want to share this multimedia presentation to the world, then just load up your video to YouTube.

Memories Bind a Family Together

Here is a beautiful description written by Dennis Rainey, whose wife, Barbara, keeps their shared experiences and memories alive for the family: “… our walls and bookshelves hold pictures and memorabilia of experiences we’ve shared together. Thanks to these memory makers, and to Barbara for being a memory catcher, our family has a clear fingerprint—a family identity uniquely ours among the six billion people in the world.”

Don’t let the 1001 pictures you took this summer fade into oblivion!