Organizing our family photos into albums is one of the many goals I’ve set for this year. Recently, for my grandma’s 95th birthday, I put together a Heritage Album on Artifact Uprising using many of her favorite pictures throughout her many blessed years of life. The quality of her photo album inspired me to create Family Yearbooks for our home that feature our favorite photos and memories throughout our married life.
Today, I’ll walk you through how to organize your family photos, and how to simply and easily put together a photo book using the archival photo compay, Artifact Uprising. Let’s get started.
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1. Organize Photos By Year
If you are like me, and have about a gazillion photos saved on your phone from the last 5 years, you’re definitly going to want to start with this first step.
Download the “DropBox” app and create folders for each year. Add your favorite photos into each appropiate year’s folder. Now, they’ll always be stored in DropBox, and you don’t risk losing them….EVER! Try to make it a habit to download your favorite photos into the folders every month so you always have them organized and easy to find.
You can organize your folder however you like in DropBox. If you take a lot of photos and want to organize by Month & Year, do it! If you take photos on your phone and on a camera, then you may want to seperate those photos from each other. Figure out a system that works for you. The main thing is to download them into one easy to use space so that they are organized and won’t ever be lost.
2. Pick Around 50-100 Photos
First of all, decide how many photo albums you want to create. I’m planning to make a Family Yearbook Album for each year since we were married. But, I’m going to begin by working backwards starting with last year and going from there. Some years photos will be harder to find on my computor, old memory cards, and such. So I’ll start with what’s easiest.
My plan is to create a yearly album of all our happenings, separate albums for our trips and vacations, and a wedding album. You may decide you want to create a photo album for each child each year, or include everyone in the same album. You may also like to feature each family vacation in its own album, like me, or just include your favorite photos from your vacations in a larger Family Yearbook. The choice is up to you.
Once you’ve decided how you’d like your photos arranged in your albums, choose around 50-100 of your favorite photos you’d like to include on the pages. You can add pages to your albums, but of course that increases the price. So, only choose your absolute must-haves. Remember, all your photos are organized for safe-keeping and you can revisit every single one of them. They don’t all have to be included in your albums.
3. Decide on an Album
We have been making photo books on Shutterfly for years. In fact, most of our photos live in their database. Our Shutterfly albums are priceless of course, but the quality just isn’t the same as an Artifact Uprising book. As I’m creating photo albums this year, I want the archival, pass down to generations, kinda quality. So that’s why I’ve chosen Aritfact Uprising. The quality just simply can’t be matched.
I like the Layflat Albums. The linen covers come in several different beautiful colors, and are hand embossed in your choice of metallic lettering. I love the copper or gold foil.
For my grandma’s Heritage Album, I decided on an Everyday Album for the value and the smaller size that would be easier for my grandma to handle and enjoy.
I chose the navy blue linen cover and the copper foil lettering. And the smaller Everyday Albums also have the thick layflat pages like the larger, more expensive albums. I was really happy with it.
4. Download Photos onto Artifact Uprising
As you can see in the photo above, I already have downloaded some photos into albums for easy arranging into albums. Download the photos you’d like to use in your album right onto Artifact Uprising’s site.
When you decide on your photo book, Artifact Uprising will prompt you to begin downloading, and they really walk you through all the steps to creating your dream album.
You can choose to either hand sort your images and page layouts, or choose the option to have them arrange your pages. I like having all the control, and arrange the pages and pictures myself.
5. Proof Your Album
After you are done arranging your album, go back through it and make sure your photos are arranged and centered exactly how you want them. Double check your spelling if you’ve chosen to add wording. And, also be on the lookout for low-resolution photos. Artifact Uprising will make these images so they’re easy to spot. I had a few low-resolution photos in grandma’s book, but that’s because some of her photos were over 50 years old. I chose to still include them and they printed nicely.
Artifact Uprising gives you the option of viewing your photo book like you’re looking at it on your coffee table. It’s a pretty cool feature….
Here are some examples of pages from grandma’s photo album. The Everyday Albums only allow one photo per page. So, to combat that issue, I used a collage app on my phone to arrange some collages of favorite photos so I could fit more photos in her book. It worked beautifully.
6. Enjoy!
When I gave grandma her photo album this Christmas, she sat with us at the kitchen table and told us the story of every picture in the book. There were probably a million and one photos I could’ve chosen, but that day we learned why those pictures were special to her.
We are blessed to still have her here with us, especially since she just recently had a stroke, and we’re thankful that her memory is still so sharp. It was amazing to watch her face as she saw many of her photos in much larger form than she’s ever seen them before.
The photos my grandpa sent her of himself during World War II turned out so vivid and clear. He’d include them in thier love letters they’d send back and forth to each other before they were married. We’d love to see those letters now, but grandma said they burned them in a fire. {insert eye roll and grin here}
One of the pages showed her and grandpa in front of their “house on wheels” that they parked in her parents driveway. Then another page showed her three little kids {my mom included} photographed on the front porch in the Sunday best. Grandma said, “that house on wheels was our first house, but this house,” pointing to the photo of her kids on the porch, “that was our first home.”
That same home pictured in her album, is the home my sister and I grew up in, and my mom, sister, and her little family live in today along with grandma. She’s always left a legacy of grace, and has the sweetest spirit. This song always reminds me of her and grandpa and what Adam and I are striving for in our marriage and home…
The photo albums from Artifact Uprising are such good quality I know we’ll all be enjoying grandma’s photo album for years to come. It will be passed down from generation to generation, and we’ll be able to share the stories of the photos with her great grandchildren and beyond.
I can’t wait to get started on our own Family Yearbook photo albums, so that we can begin telling our story through pictures and leave a lasting legacy for our children and grandchildren.
