With a phone bursting with family photos, mother of four Stacey Wesley explores ways to manage the plethora of pics and celebrate the memories.
Anyone else have a phone bulging at the seams full of photos that you never do anything with? Plus the “quality” ones on the expensive camera? Children love looking back at photos from when they were little. It triggers special memories and invites engaging chats. Here’s some creative ways to bring that nearly full storage on your phone to life.
Print your pics!
There are amazing apps now like Printicular and Fotofinish where you send photos straight from your phone and collect them the next day from your local Warehouse Stationery or get them posted. Done! Or some pharmacies or stores have the machines where you upload your images, and pop back in an hour to collect. There are also options to get photos printed onto mugs, posters, canvases and more.
Super simple photo book
Buy a cheap blank scrapbook. Get your child to help you cover with magazine cuttings or their own drawings. And then let them stick in some favourite snaps. Write a wee story and add a date beside each photo. These don’t take up much space on the shelf but offer hours of couch perusing. You could make a yearly one as a family, either online, or, if you’d rather avoid the glue stick – at sites like Snapfish or Photobox.
Classic montage wall
Source some funky frames, either new or secondhand. They quite often look better if they don’t match. You could always paint them to spruce them up.
Fill with favourite memories. Consider printing some in black and white
amidst the colour. Often black and white photos look crisper, especially close-ups of people.
The leftovers
If you print a pile and have leftovers, find a box that allows you to create a mini filing system where you can separate them and label or date them. Then it’s easy to flick back through if you’re on the hunt for something. Or just chuck them in without a filing system – the kids will love rifling through the box and selecting pics to adorn their own stories, posters and cards.
Capture that picture-perfect moment
So how do you avoid 700 photos of the same shot? If you’re trying to get a good photo of the small people, don’t bother busting your butt trying to line them up. Gather them together and then start chatting to them. Crack a joke, wait until they’re engaged with each other and then call out. Then click a couple of times, giving yourself a delete option.
Natural always looks best when it comes to photos of children, so don’t shout “cheese!”
There will almost always be the sibling that pulls a face, but who cares. As adults, we fondly remember and joke about those childhood days.
