Organise Your Family’s Digital Photos – Part Three: Choose Some Photographs To Print

Welcome back to the final instalment in my series on organising your family’s digital photographs. In case you missed the previous instalments, you can find part one here, and part two here.

In the first two posts, we covered backing up your photos so that they’re safe for years to come, and organising them into a filing system so you can find what you’re looking for. Today, we’ll be looking at choosing which photographs you’ll print, so that you can look at them more often.

Why Print Your Photographs?

In today’s digital world you might be wondering whether there’s a need to print your photographs – afterall you have the peace of mind of knowing that they’re safely backed up, and organised in a filing system so that you can find them easily. Is there really a need to print them?

My answer to this is a big yes! Of course, we are all different, but I think that printing photos makes them so much more accessible – whether it’s having a framed print on the wall that brings a smile to your face whenever you look at it, or snuggling up with your little ones to look through an album and tell them stories about how they used to be – we’re much more likely to look at photographs often when they’re printed out. Plus, it’s believed that when children grow up surrounded by photographs it can help them develop a positive self-image.

A Simple System For Choosing What To Print

When you have so many photographs it can be overwhelming to decide which to print – I completely get it. I’ve been there, at the end of the year sifting through hundreds of digital photos trying to choose which to put into an album.

What works better for me, and could be a good approach for you is the tactic of little and often. When I take new photographs of my family, or we’ve returned from a holiday I don’t typically want to print the photos right away. But I don’t want to leave it months before I sort them out either.

Instead I keep a separate folder on my Google Drive for printing. Within that folder are separate folders for each month of the year. Each time I take some new photos, I’ll back all of my photographs up on my hard drive, then I pull out the ones that I think I might like to print, edit them, and save a copy to Google Drive too.

At the end of the year, I then have a ready-made shortlist of edited photos to print – perhaps to display at home, pop into an album, or print as gifts for the grandparents.

Choosing How To Print Your Photos

So what do you do with your short list of printed photos? There are a lot of options:

Choose your favourites, and create a gallery wall. Once you’ve bought the frames and mounts, you can change or rotate the photographs whenever you choose.

Use picture ledges, washi tape, or wired frames to display your photographs in different ways.

Create an annual album filled with all of the photographs you’ve saved over the year.

File your photographs neatly into a library storage box like this one – you can set one up for each year.

Over to You

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series on organising your photographs, and have found it helpful. What other questions have come up as you’ve worked through the process? I’d love to hear – let me know in the comments below.