Preserving and Displaying Family Photos

We bought our first digital camera before the kids were born and purchased our first SLR after Noah started walking (I quickly grew tired of having pictures of the back of his head!) I love the instant gratification of seeing my pictures right away, as well as being able to snap a bunch of photos in hopes of getting "just the right one". However, for the longest time, my photos went from my camera to my computer to . . . nowhere.

Then, I stumbled upon a system that worked for me - and has been for the past four years. Here's what I do each month:

• Edit and print my favorite photos for the month, then hang them on the photo board in the kitchen (see picture).

• Take down the old photos, and put them in an envelope labeled with the month and year. In theory, this makes it easy to scrapbook, but since I've switched to digital scrapbooking, it doesn't really help in that area. But, I do make a separate folder for all my edited photos each month, so when I am ready to scrapbook, my favorites are easy to find. For example, in my "Family" folder, I have a sub-folder for "2009", a sub-folder for each month and (inside each of those) a sub-folder with my favorites.

• Write a quickie newsletter for our family each month with highlights of our activities, updates on each of the kids and, of course, our favorite photos.

• Mail the newsletters and my favorite six photos to each family member.

The monthly newsletters and photos to go into albums I make for our families each Christmas. The albums have 12 plastic inserts (8 1/2" x 11") for the newsletters and another 12 inserts for photos (each holds three 4" x 6" photos on each side).

Often Jim asks why I go through all the trouble, and I always tell him that while I love sharing it with our family, I really do it for myself. It's so nice at the end of the year to be able to look back at our favorite memories . . . which is especially nice since I'm three years behind on my scrapbooking!