Are your favourite memories stuck on your phone? Here’s how you can turn your digital photos into 4 different beautiful, tangible keepsakes you and your family can enjoy every day.
#1 GREETING CARDS
5×7 holiday cards fill my fridge, and I love it! And if you’re looking for strong, simple magnets – I love my rare-earth magnets from Lee Valley Tools.
– Giving out annual Christmas and Holiday cards is a great way of keeping in touch with friends and family and showing them you care. I love receiving these cards as much as I love gifting them! These double sided cards are printed on thick card stock paper and can be custom designed with a greeting or caption. To get access to your own online card editor and order gallery, please contact me.
Double sided high quality holiday cards with envelopes – these ones are printed with quality and care. And they far surpass Shutterfly and Vistaprint! They can be ordered through my photography account. Just e-mail me for more info.
#2 LAY FLAT PHOTO BOOKS
Lay Flat Photo Books from PosterJack – I love choosing the photo cover and adding the year for easy reference.
– Make a family photo album! I print my family photos once a year in a photo book I design and print at PosterJack. I include my family photos that were professionally taken but also my iPhone photos that I take throughout the year. You can upload your photos to https://posterjack.ca/products/layflat-photo-books?snowball=GABRIELLE68191 and start your album design right away.
Please note: I don’t often share affiliate links, but when I do it’s for products that I love and use often.
11×8.5 inches Lay Flat Photo Book from PosterJack – I love printing one once a year.
Need help with the process? Click here to request my step-by-step guide.
11×8.5 inches Lay Flat Photo Book from PosterJack
#3 TRADITIONAL PHOTO ALBUMS
Traditional photo albums with 4×6 clear sleeves.
– If you love printing photos a bit at a time throughout the year, traditional photo albums with 4×6 clear sleeves on each page are a good fit for you. This flexible way of displaying your photos allows you to slowly fill an album over the course of a year. Print a handful of photos at a time, and fill the album as you go. I recommend Photo Central in Winnipeg or London Drugs for low-cost/high-quality 4×6 prints. Just upload your high-res jpgs to their website and pick up your prints in store.
#4 FRAMED PHOTOS FOR YOUR WALLS
This is a 16×24 Gallery Box from PosterJack. The photo is printed on a solid surface and perfectly floated inside the white frame.
– Print and frame your photos. There’s always that one stunning photo from a photo shoot that you know is “the one”. Decide which size you’d like and have it printed and framed to hang on your wall at home. Again, PosterJack is a great place for ready-to-hang prints. Framed products from PosterJack are found in their Shop > Wall Art section: Framed Prints and Gallery Boxes are my favourites!
If you’re looking for something a bit more fun, Peel & Stick prints in their Photo Prints section are awesome. What’s a Peel & Stick? The name says it all.
This is a 12×18 Peel & Stick print from PosterJack. You can stick it on a wall, remove it and stick it somewhere else. Repositionable up to fifty times!
√ $10 flat shipping fee, no matter how big your order is
√ convenient ready-to-display products. No more buying frames from IKEA and fiddling with the DIY framing process (which I hate with a passion!)
Another Peel & Stick print from PosterJack. I seriously have these all over my house. I can’t get enough of them!
Why I’m an affiliate partner with them:
I was printing so much from them and recommending them to all my friends, family and clients… when it dawned on me: I should get an affiliate link!
So in case you’re wondering – they didn’t approach me to give me free products in exchange for being their promoter. Years ago, I found them myself first, fell in love with their products, and naturally started promoting them to everyone I knew!
At first they had quality issues (10 years ago). A few times I had to ask them to re-print their errors, which they did for free. For a while I was not recommending them to clients. But after some time, I noticed their products were being consistently delivered beautifully and with zero flaws. That’s when I started recommending them to my clients.
They have been a trusted printer for me ever since.
HAVE A PRINTING PLAN
So if you’re like me, and you don’t like that your digital photos just sit on the computer for years and years, make sure to have a printing plan. Hopefully the print recommendations above will give you the motivation to start printing your photos more regularly.
If the task feels huge and overwhelming or if you’re behind in years of unprinted photos, don’t worry about it.
Start small.
Start by printing one photo album or even just one framed print. Go through your photos from the last 12 months.
Print just one thing to start.
The excitement of receiving that first physical print will feel like a small win. I promise!
And small wins will motivate you to keep going, and print even more.
You’ll learn how I stay on top of my photos, how I make sure to print a family photo book once a year, and how to store your digital photos so you never lose them.
NEED UPDATED FAMILY PHOTOS?
Contact me to book your next family photo session in Winnipeg!
I send out e-mails that show you how to make the most of your phone camera to take better photos.
I hope this has inspired you to bring your memories to life—because there’s nothing quite like holding a beautiful photo in your hands. It’s a feeling no screen can ever replace!
When I was young, my mom had a point and shoot film camera. She’d buy a 24 exposure roll of film and it would last her half a year, sometimes more. She’d pull it out to document small moments in our childhood: a birthday party, a picnic with friends, a trip to the beach. After all 24 photos were taken, she’d roll up the film, put it into its tiny cylindrical container and drop it off at the local photo lab. A week and a few dollars later, she’d get her photos back and we’d eagerly pull the stack of 4×6 prints out of the envelope to look through it all. It was pure joy, and we cherished re-living the last few months through those prints.
My childhood’s story and its moments would be most remembered by the photos my mom took. If something wasn’t documented in a photo, my memories of it are very foggy.
I’m a very nostalgic person and one of my favourite things to do is to flip through old photo albums. Back in the film days, you didn’t have photos without prints. Inevitably, physical photo albums were always being made.
Enter in the digital age. It’s so easy to take photos. In fact, we are drowning in opportunities for capturing memories. Our phones live in our back pockets and they can take unlimited photos.
But are we printing them? Are photo albums being made?
For me, I would get so overwhelmed by my iPhone camera roll that I would just ignore the task. Years would go by, and hardly any photos of my kids would get printed.
But that has changed! I finally realized that I needed to develop an easy system so that printing would become second nature. We now have family photos albums on our shelf in the living room, and it’s SO valued to us.
It comes down to basic photo habits. No organizational apps required! It’s easy. Here’s what I do!
STEP 1 – First off, I make sure to bring my iPhone everywhere so that I never miss a moment to take a photo, especially candid moments. Get into the habit of always taking a photo whenever you feel an inkling to capture a moment.
STEP 2 – Every few weeks, I go through my camera roll and I “heart” all my favourite photos, especially the ones that capture the story of our family’s life. As the weeks go by, your “favourites” album on your iPhone will grow with a curated collection of all your important photos.
STEP 3 – Whenever you’re hearting new photos, take the time to edit them right away. (Don’t wait until the end of the year, otherwise you’ll be tempted to skip this step!) You can use any photo editing app, but my favourite is Adobe’s free Lightroom Mobile app. Here are some quick and simple editing tips:
– import your photos into Lightroom. Edit them with these tools:
– adjust the exposure slider to get better brightness
– use the contrast tools to make your photos pop
– adjust the colour tools to correct for any harsh colour saturation
– use the texture and clarity tools if your photos need a bit of extra “crunchiness”
– add a bit of sharpening and noise reduction to finish off the photo
STEP 4 – Once your photo is edited in the Lightroom app, export it as a JPG and select “Largest Available Dimensions”. Organize all those exported high-res jpg photos into one album (or folder) on your phone so that they are stored in a single, easy place to find.
STEP 5 – Continue steps 1 – 4 for twelve months. At the end of the year, go to PosterJack.ca and upload all your final edited photos into their photo book layout editor. Place your images in their pre-made layouts in chronological order. You can also add captions to the photos if you’d like.
I aim to have 250 final edited photos per book and I choose the 8×10 horizontal softcover book with 120 pages.
(Side note: as much as I love taking iPhone photos of my family, I always make sure to book a professional photographer to take photos of our family once a year. Those photos are generally the ones I use for the book cover and inside the album as well.)
STEP 6 – When the layout is done, I triple check everything (layout, design, typos, accidental duplicates, etc.). Once it’s good, I submit it for print!
STEP 7 – On top of printing an annual photo book, I also print and frame four 12” x 12” family photos for our living room walls once a year. I rotate them out every time we get professional photos taken. My favourite place to print our professional family photos on our walls is at Photo Central. They have an easy online ordering system and their print quality is fantastic.
This whole process does take some time, but you will never regret the energy you spent to print your family photos!
It’s never too late to start. If you feel overwhelmed by the backlog of photos from years past, don’t let it stop you from taking baby steps. Start with the most recent year, print that album, and the excitement of receiving it in your hands will motivate you to chip away at the previous years.
Soon enough, your shelf will be filled with photo albums that I promise your kids (and grandkids!) will love looking through for years to come.
Photos only grow in value the more time passes!
PS: none of the printers I mentioned above are sponsoring this blog post – I just love them and share their links because they’re awesome!
