What do you do with all thost digital photos on your hard drive?

What should you do with all those photos – digital and non-digital?
I am sure that many of you do not want to scrapbook your photos. It is just so time-consuming!! But you do want to be able to enjoy your photos, both digital and film-based photos.

Printing them is the first step and I highly recommend it. Film-based photos come back that way, making it an easy thing to do. But keeping them in the envelopes from the developer is NOT the way to enjoy the pictures. Keeping them in a cardboard box is also not a good way to store them. Printing digital photos is a little more effort, but there are many places that will do it for you. Some people like to do it themselves (which is great, but perhaps not for a huge amount of pictures) or any developer will do it for you. They do you no good on your hard drive. So while having them on your computer is great for posterity and all, it does nothing for you here and now.

Even if you do not want to scrapbook them, you should keep an album handy and each time you get pictures back, take a few minutes and add them to the album. Most people think that the backlog is so huge that they do not want to even start. However, it is never going to get easier and you will never have the huge chunk of time you think you will to do the whole thing, SO you should just start from where you are now and do it going forward. Every time you have a few extra minutes and this is a priority and on your list, then you can chip away at the backlog. The best part about starting right now is that you can go shopping and find an album that you like and just start using it!

Here is where I have to admit that I am a scrapbooker. But even I got way behind. Now some people like to do things chronologically (ME!) and some people do not. The way I got “caught up” is that for all the years I had digital pictures, I used snapfish to create a hardcover book of them, ne per year. This was not cheap, but it gave me a great deal of satisfaction! There are many sites that do photo books, I just happened to use snapfish, so use whatever site you want to. I did mine just before Christmas and also used that site (saving on shipping!) to buy a few photo-based Christmas gifts, especially for grandparents and other relatives. They are not as pretty as my regular scrapbooks, but they are DONE and there is a surprising amount of templates to choose from. So now if I could just get 2008 done…