Just got back from a trip to Canada and I had over 600 photos from my camera and phone. It was a week long trip, Toronto and Niagara Falls, and I snapped pictures at all the events! Which is what you want to do! But then you come back and pull all the photos together and it can be so overwhelming. Hopefully this article helps you sort it all out!
So I have two goals with my photos … think about your goals.
- Capture the memories
- Create scrapbook layouts
Capture the memories
It’s wonderful to take trips and have family events, but the photos can hard to organize. Here’s my steps:
- Pull all your photos together. I like to download from my camera and phone to my computer. I create folders for the year, then the trip and I name the folder by the date — 20180715 Toronto — so that the photos are sorted by date, making the easy to find.
- Next, I go thru that folder and delete the junkie photos. I keep most of the photos, but the ones where I took 3 pictures of the same thing, I whittle down to the best photo. I managed to get this trip down to 400 photos.
- Finally, I upload the photos to Snapfish. I back up my computer data drive, but I also want them somewhere that I can get to them in case my computer and back-up fail, plus I can request prints and share from Snapfish.
Create scrapbook layouts
I have chronological 12×12 scrapbook albums with summary of our holidays, birthdays, and trips. I also have 8×8 scrapbook albums for special trips. For each event, I decide how I’m going use the photographs. Here’s my steps:
- First decide if I’m doing an entire 8×8 book or 12×12 summary layout.
- When doing an 8×8 book, you can use a lot more photos, but you probably want to print them smaller. You can print (2) 2×3’s on a 4×6 print using certain collage software. So then, if you do a 20-page 8×8 album, getting 2-3 small photos on a page, you can plan on using 40 to 60 photos, or 20 to 30 4×6 prints.
- When doing a summary layout, 2 to 4 pages in my 12×12 album, I really try to whittle down the photos to about 10 to 30 photos.
- Second, whittle down the photos. Create a folder called PRINT under my trip folder. Then, going thru the photos, drag your favorites into that PRINT folder.
- Make a list of the things you did on the trip, tell the story. Then pick the best photo that describes that event.
- Look thru the PRINT folder and decide if it includes all the highlights.
- Make sure you have a good picture of each of the people on the trip.
- Finally, print the photos. Print the best photos in 4×6 size and make the others into 2×3 size so that you can fit as many as possible into your layouts.