5 Photo Projects I do Every Year

Getting pictures off of your camera and onto your walls, printed for family or doing anything other than looking at them on the computer --is sometimes asking a lot.

I take a lot of pictures. I should probably be glad that I don't have a smart phone, because I would only compound the problem. But I have made a commitment to doing the following photo projects every year. Most of these get done during the holidays--when things are crazy, but they are important to me, so I make a concerted effort to plan ahead and get them done every. single. year.

1. A Christmas Card

2013-from Shutterfly

Sometimes a Christmas card is the only way our family may see our mugs in a given year, so it's important to me to send a card. I also like to file an extra away so I can see the years past.

2. Yearly Photo ornament

This tradition started the year Caroline was born. I don't know how I got the idea (probably free Coke points) but I have done one every year for her. I really like it. If we have more children in the future, I will probably just do one ornament with all of them on it. Otherwise, I will need to buy another tree--not that I have a problem with that ;)

I get these ornaments for free from Shutterfly with MyCokeReward points, and they make great gifts too!

2010-

2011-

2012-

2013-

The twins

3. Yearly Photo book

There will be more posts coming about our yearly photo books, but here's the collection so far. This is by far the best thing I ever started doing with our photos. Caroline loves to look at them and it feels good to get so many pictures printed.

This year I'm working on 2013 and 2014 at the same time to try and get ahead!

I store them in an armoire with the rest of our photo goodies.

4. Yearly Photo CD

Ok, so I'm kind of crazy. I like to have back ups for my backups and then maybe a couple more backups.

Each year I burn a CD of the best images and store it in a box in our armoire.

I also include a CD of images in the back cover of each photo book.

Of course all my images are also stored on my computer and external hard drive. I need to get some system where all the pictures aren't at my house, because if it burns down I'm going to be a hot mess!

Here's the armoire with all our photo goodies. Photo books on the left, Cds in the middle and other photo albums on the right. I am working to get the pictures from the photo albums into photo books. That way I can get rid of the albums and have more space! Yahoo! (The albums are my bridal and baby showers, and a trip to Europe from 2005)

5. Caroline by the year

I only wish I had started this project sooner. Every year I like to take a photo and add some things that Caroline is really into. Helps me to remember. Going through these pictures I realized that I had already forgotten how much Caroline loved to sing 'The wheels on the bus' when she was little. I don't want to forget those things. When I started this I think I was using Picnik, but now I use Picasa. You could also use PicMonkey or similar photo editing software. You can see a little more specific post I did about these here.