Creating A Family Album – Part 2

It turns out – I have quite a bit to say on this topic! So, I’ve decided to split this post into two parts instead of writing an entire book in just one post.
If you missed my first post, go back & read it here.
This second post talks about my “why” behind putting a family yearbook together.

If you would prefer to read my thoughts over watching my video – you can read the transcript below!

My mom is a scrapbooker. She loves to take photos, put them on a page with pretty stickers and pretty paper and to journal a little bit about what is going on in those photos. My mom has created scrapbooks for each of my siblings, as well as myself and they’re huge. I have three of these – they make up my entire life. They’re beautiful! They’re literal works of art.

However, I am not a scrapbooker. I hate scrapbooking. We can probably blame it on the fact that I’m an Enneagram 1 and a perfectionist. It literally takes me hours to choose the photos, lay them out on the page, pick out the stickers, then choose the right colored paper, and then let’s not forget the fact that you have to write something – and that writing is forever. It terrifies me & paralyzes me – so I just don’t do it.

Here’s the thing though: we live in an age where there are more photos than ever. My parents used to take photos of us on a roll of film. That roll of film would get developed and they had the images. They didn’t pull that camera out every single day and snap photos like crazy because film was expensive (it still is).
Now we have smartphones that have beautiful cameras in them and we have the luxury of capturing daily life like never before. Especially if you have children, you know what I mean. 

So the question is: what in the world do you do with all of those photos? If you’re anything like me, I literally have thousands of photos on my phone. Sure, some of them are pretty blah, but some of them are really good. A lot of them tell stories of things that are happening in our lives and they’re stories that I don’t want to forget.

However, there is no way that I am going to print out thousands of 4×6’s – what in the world am I going to do with them? Because we have already established: I am not a scrapbooker. And the last thing I want to do is print out a thousand 4×6’s and then put them in a box and put them on a shelf in a closet somewhere. 

So, what do you do? 

I have struggled with this idea for many years: all of these images that simply live on my hard drives. It’s terrifying to me to know that those memories are just on a hard drive and those hard drives could crash and my children will probably – let’s be honest – they will never go through those hard drives and look at all of the images I have (because I have millions).

I finally have found a solution though and I am very excited for this solution!

And that is creating a family yearbook. 

One of my personal photography heroes has talked at length about creating family yearbooks for her own family. And I have tried – meaning started and then failed – the process of creating one of these family yearbooks for the last 4 years. This year though, I put it in my goals to create and print a family yearbook for the year 2019. Because I wrote it down and put it in my goals that I published online – I actually did it! 

It took me a long time. I worked on picking the photos, designing the album, and setting everything up almost every single night for about 3 months. Now, before that scares you off, just know that I’m a professional photographer and I’m extremely picky about these things. I also have more photos than probably most of you.

I created this book using a website called Blurb. It has almost 400 pages of images. This holds everything that we did in 2019 as a family – from photos of us just doing life at home, to the trips we took, the roller coasters we rode, the birthday parties we had, and all of the fun things we did together as a family. Pretty much every single spread of this album has images that bring back memories. And that to me is completely priceless. 

If you have never done anything with the images on your phone, I would highly suggest thinking about and then potentially starting the process of creating a family yearbook. Or maybe you should just start small and create a family book from a trip that you went on. Maybe you just want to create a book from the professional photos that you have taken once a year. 

No matter what – start somewhere! And I promise, you will get addicted to the process of printing your images and you won’t want to stop. My children will probably never look through my hard drives at images, but I can guarantee that they will sit down and look through this book.

I love that I can take this book with me and show it to family members and it’s something tangible to hold – which is far superior to showing them images on a computer screen. There’s just something magical about holding images in your hand. It truly brings back the most precious memories that otherwise would be completely lost.

Don’t lose your memories – go make yourself a photo book! And use my code here to get $30 off your first book!