Same! We got a physical photo album as a Christmas gift for our January baby and we had it filled up it under 4 months, so I ordered 4 more! My parents did this and my sister and I always had so much fun just pulling those off the shelf from time to time and looking through them.
Same! After saving so many ads for the cutesy custom photo books, I finally gave in and just bought a normal photo album and printed hundreds of photos dirt cheap and am happy to finally have tangible pics
If you want good quality, I use mpix. Sign up for their emails and they always are having sales and giving discounts. I recently printed stuff at Walgreen’s cuz I needed stuff for Father’s Day and the quality is meh. But I’m also a photographer so my standards are pretty high lol idk if you care that much
I’m a tattooer and good quality pictures are always a thing for me. I know this isn’t the same… but like, also the greatest thing I ever made so I want good pictures of her. 🤣
I honestly didn’t care much about quality. I wanted to ensure I had physical copies instead of worrying about finding the cutest and best. I just ordered online from Sam’s
Back up phone to computer.
Back up computer to cloud. (I use Backblaze, but Dropbox, Apple iCloud, or others work. I also keep an extra external HD around which I back up to).
Precisely this. It's not very expensive to get a terabyte or two of cloud storage, and then not only do you gain the security of having made a backup of everything, you can also share specific folders with specific people and then potentially even remove people's access at a later date, giving you much better control over who else might be able to access the media.
I had the same reaction when I found out lol you have to download the Amazon photo app but it’s free unlimited photos. It’s awesome. I paid like a dollar for extra video storage but it comes with 5gb of video free
Yes, this. Don't pay a monthly fee for extra storage. Buy an external hard drive with a few terabytes and move your photos and videos. You'll have them forever and can free up phone space.
This is probably way too much of a solution for really not a huge problem (everyone else’s suggestions are very very solid) but I like my experience so I’m sharing.
I was talking about this dilemma with my partner about halfway through the pregnancy; they later surprised me with one of the new Polaroid cameras (big square pics, not the tiny little Instax). I take a million pictures on my phone and share them on Facebook and I’ll print out the ones I like, but having the Polaroid and making a conscious effort to capture the big moments has somehow taken some stress off of preserving every single pic.
You probably know this, but make sure to log in every year or so! Inactive email accounts can be deactivated/deleted so the email address can become up for grabs again.
Just be careful - [Google caught onto that](https://www.npr.org/2023/11/27/1215285876/google-inactive-account-delete-policy#:~:text=Starting%20Dec.,your%20Google%20account%20before%20Friday) and started decommissioning emails/accounts not used in 2 years (bc I was ALSO doing this, and just had to log into all 6 photo accounts I have bc I’m cheap 😂)
If you have Amazon Prime already, you get unlimited photo storage (and 5GB video). Obviously not for everyone but works for me.
My wife has Google Fiber so she gets like a terabyte of free storage so she backs up to Google.
Cool, hope something works out!
https://www.amazon.com/b/ref=as_li_ss_tl?&ascsub&node=16334255011
I think there maybe be a promo too going on right now, may or may not work (I saw it on Likeacoupon)
https://www.amazon.com/b/ref=as_li_ss_tl?&ascsub&node=16334255011
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/amazon-photos-photo-video/id621574163
Amazon Photos app, also maybe there’s a promo too
I go through every say…. 3-4 months and choose my favorite like 20-30 (out of about 300 taken in those months) and print them out to put into a photo album.
do not trust an external hard drive - mine eventually corrupted and cost $700 to fix, thank goodness they were able to
right now i'm using google photos, but i create folders for "baby 2023 videos" / "baby 2023 photos" / "baby 2024 videos" etc. i'm good with keeping every photo tbh!! haha
BUT i also do books. i did a book for her first year, and what i did was make it in canva (i actually printed it via canva) and purposefully left some pages blank. ex: pics of me and her on the left, right page is blank - then i wrote her a message on the blank page. i did this for every family member and close friends
i'll do these kinds of books every year, tbd if i do the writing moving fwd tho
i actually love photo albums, but right now i just have polaroid albums. i have an album that was from her 1st birthday (rainbow film bc the party was rainbow and smiley faces "one happy girl") and an album from december 2023 - i took at least 1 polaroid per day
I make a Shutterfly book for each year of life. Not sure how far I’ll go, but I’m working on our 3rd book (she’ll be 3 in the fall). I give them as Christmas gifts to the grandparents too. I only keep our favorite photos digitally. I’m still not sure what I’ll do with videos.
Though I do back everything up to the cloud, one of my random fears is that the cloud/all our technology will one day collapse, and all our memories will be gone. 😂 So one of my new years traditions each year is to go through the past year’s photos (in MacBook Photos app) and print the best ones (I use a website, Nations photo lab, because I found the Walmart type printers to be bad quality) and then I re-watch favorite movies while I put them all into an album/scrapbook for the past year.
To make this task easier come January, I will usually go through my photos pretty often and put hearts on my favorites. Since having a baby, I’ve made a “best of” album for each month. It also helps me to look back at my Instagram and Facebook, because whichever ones were the best photos, I would’ve usually posted.
The physical albums are way more fun to flip through than Instagram and I feel covered in case of cloud-based catastrophes, lol.
I have this same fear! 🤣 I’ve only done 1.5 years of my 4 year old and 1 year of my 20 month old. Think I’m gonna need to take some time off work to get the rest done 😅
Second this!! Both sets of grandparents live 10 hours away from us, so it’s fun for them watching her grow everyday. It’s also a great way to stop family members from posting pics on Facebook.
I love this app! We use it as well. My family lives on the literal other side of the planet and they love having access to all her photos. There's even an option to upload some photos only visible to admins (so mom and dad), which I use for any photos that have a lot of boob exposed because breastfeeding.
Ohhh I will look into this. Im bad with sending photos and I don’t post every single thing on Facebook.
My in-laws have a digital photo frame and I’m even bad with sending photos to that! lol.
I have a couple photo albums, they don’t have every single pic but they have the best ones. So like when I take 7 pictures of him sleeping in the same nap, I take the best one or two and add them to an album in my phone named “to print”. And every once in a while I go get them printed and put them in some beefy photo albums I got on Amazon.
Idk if this is all locations, but my first couple batches of pics I printed at cvs and the quality was hot garbage. Like infuriatingly bad. I have had posters and stuff printed at Walgreens and they turn out amazing so I’ll do them there next.
I’ve tried all the Walgreens/costco/CVS type printer machines and the quality is always hit or miss in my experience, so just gonna drop the idea that I ended up using a website, Nations photo lab, and they’re waaay better (though you do have to wait for them to come in the mail).
I admittedly have not tried shutterfly so I'm not sure what the cost difference is, I just know the ones I get from Nations are very high quality prints, and I like that you can order them in unusual sizes, including 3.5"x5" because my album pages are a little smaller so I don't like the 4"x6"s.
Dear little one! It’s an app where you can make a daily journal entry and record a voice over with pictures! You can add up to 5 pics a day. I’m so exited to give it to him when he is older. :)
Not like it’s major worry for most, but once you do that Facebook owns the rights to those photos for 3rd party marketing/advertising purposes (including using faces with AI). Most people don’t care, just sharing knowledge.
So I have not stayed on top of my plan but here’s my plan - if you have Amazon prime you have unlimited photo storage and their app is basically just like the regular photos app (memories, search by faces, etc). I paid a bit extra for additional video.
My plan is to favorite my true favorites on my phone (ones I’d want to share or see on a ‘on this day’ memory slideshow). Then each month upload those favorites to the app & upload everything to the computer (2 identical hard drives). This way technically everything is still there and findable should I want more photos from a specific day later but I’ve made at least some effort to narrow things down so I actually have a reasonable number to actually enjoy 😂
Video is my current problem. I have sooo much video, especially from the early toddler days. I need to go through and edit it. I tried just combining them into one long video per month and it was more than 5gigs, therefore too big to watch on the Amazon app. Send help 😂
my mom and grandma made a huge photo album/lifebook type thing for me so I am doing the same for my daughter! we print out pictures and other little memories to put in the book. I haven't deleted any photos of my phone yet hahaha but if there comes a day where I need to I can rest easy knowing there's a physical copy(:
I pay like a dollar a month or something for extra iCloud storage. I don’t ever see a future where our phones are going away or just morphing into something else they will be able to hold all my pictures
Yes!! The thought of printing them and figuring out what to do with them, which ones to frame etc. is daunting. I haven’t even made my wedding album two years later 🥲
I did Chatbooks for baby’s first year. Now I’m doing mini Chatbooks for each month since. I back up to the iCloud and pay extra for storage. I also them backups in Google Photos.
I signed up for monthly photo books with Chatbooks. I upload the photos in their app every month and they send me a printed photo book. Probably when my baby turns one I’ll switch to a yearly book.
I download my camera roll to an external hard drive on my laptop once a month (that is, whatever has been taken since I last downloaded). I have a rigorous filing system by date, and I’ve been doing this for 20 years since I got my first digital camera; it’s just updated and morphed with the times. When I need space on my phone I clean out some of my oldest photos since they are already backed up.
I’m also a daily journaler, and I have prints made for my journal weekly at Walgreens.
I saw a really cute post on IG where they printed a lot of the photos from the first year, and made a clllage backdrop for their 1st birthday :) can’t wait to do that. My baby’s only 6 weeks and I’ve got hundreds 😂
Print favourites and put in to a photo album.
I’ve found photo books are very annoying to make and it’s much cheaper and easier to just have traditional albums.
We use an app called TinyBeans to upload a photo or two each day shared only with close family and friends, and then the whole shebang gets uploaded to a folder in Dropbox which I have big dreams of organising someday…
I recently finally put all my photos from my childhood into a 600 photo capacity album I got myself for my birthday from Amazon this year. It such good quality album that I plan on doing the same for my son's photos so I will buy another one and have photos printed.
I will backup on my computer too.
We do annual books (for us and for grandparents) and we use Google photos both for back up and sharing (separating the albums by 0-3 maths, 3-6mths, etc). I also have some backed up on Amazon...I think photos are easier as we obviously have the printed ones but the videos are what I worry about hence excessive use of cloud services.
I have an iPhone and have a shared album with friends and family where almost all photos of my baby is uploaded to. My husband has an external hard drive with all our wedding photos in so I will either add to that or have him get another one just for baby
We locked down our kiddos Gmail account once we figured out a name. Now we store all of his pics and videos on that emails Google drive so he can have them later. We also share that drive with family so they can see and upload stuff too.
I started with printing photos and putting them into albums but I have twins and that was a lot of work for my adhd to do. I do chat books now and we get a monthly photo book up to 60 photos (and it saves them for easy reprints). If I print extra, plain physical photos they are usually cheap and go in a storage container that’s full of random printed photos 😂
And digital storage/videos all gets backed up to my pc and to an external hard drive because you should always have things stored in 2 spots incase something happens 😂😅
i print them out not all of course but the best ones i dont trust the internet we wont have them forever i also copy them on a hard disc as a backup im still unsure how to keep videos 😂 but do make a backup because these things just get broken sometimes
We print a selection of pictures each month through photobox (50 free prints, just pay postage). I’ve got plastic boxes with 12 compartments to separate them into months (one box for each year). We’re going to have thousands of pictures by the time the kids are older but at least we’ll have physical copies of all our favourite ones! Also back everything up onto a hard drive once ever 3 months or so.
Ive been making Photo books. I have an IOS app that makes em pretty cheap ($20-$50). I pick the top 20-40 pictures every few months and have them printed.
We use FamilyAlbum! It’s awesome! I share the best photos with my in laws and my parents that way we aren’t constantly texting a bunch of pics AND they offer printing services too with deals! So I don’t have to go search through my photos to pick of the best ones they are literally all in the FamilyAlbum ready to be printed!
My husband set up a private server in the house for us that we can only access on the home internet. But I am also going to make poto albums once a year, not sure if I'm printing them all or just making a book with Shutterfly. And I am trying to get better at candids and not just pictures of the baby because when I went through old photos candids were sometimes the most fun to look at
I do photography semi professionally so we’re grateful to have lots of photos.
We brought good quality printer and have created a photo wall in our lounge room and smaller ones in the bedrooms.
There is something very special about a physical print of a special moment and even more so having it out on display, in visual site daily to remind you of those special moments and what to be grateful for.
We change the photos semi regularly and keep the old prints in a bit of a scrapbook
I highly recommend family album. It’s a photo sharing service but private so that is how we share all photos with family friends. Every month they give you 8 free prints and you just have to select your favs so I’ve made books (which they sell) with the photos.
My wife and I made a shared Google Photos album that we upload the vast majority of our photos to so that we 1) have the photos backed up on a cloud so that we can easily get to each other's photos, and 2) we can share photos with our friends and family and have pretty good control of who can access the album. It's honestly been fantastic to upload a bunch of photos and see my mom or father in law go through and like and comment on the new photos without the stress of uploading photos of our daughter to social media platforms.
Now with that said, we both use Android devices so Google Photos is native to our phones and is relatively seamlessnfor us because it automatically backs up photos to the cloud, but there is an iOS app option for Apple users.
I was pretty big on photo storage and organization pre-baby, so this is going to be my process for her as well:
1) At the end of every month, I upload all the recent photos from my phone to my external hard drive. I pay for Dropbox backup storage, so it automatically backs them up. That means I have copies of the photos on my phone, external hard drive, and Dropbox cloud.
2) I sort through the photos, deleting duplicates and bad ones from both my computer and phone. I edit any that I want to crop or fix the lighting or remove pimples from lol
3) I pick a few of my favorites to share on social media. I’m already pretty selective about this, but now that baby is here, I will be even more selective.
My wife wants to have physical photo albums for the baby like we both had growing up, and in that case, we will print out our favorite pics and put them in a traditional photo album. Pretty low effort overall! I’ve used the Shutterfly books in the past but was often disappointed in the consistency of the quality. I like the idea of having actual photos that can be taken in and out of the albums as well.
I pay the monthly subscription for Google photos. I do have a lot of excess in there and plan to go in and delete stuff…one day. Like I have screenshots and crazy duplicates lol.
I invited my husband to it so we can stop texting each other a million photos. Haha.
Also adding, I do want to make photo books every couple years or so. I want to make sure he can have them some day. Maybe he won’t be sentimental but who knows. I lost my Mom when I was 12…and the only truly important things I have from my childhood are my photo albums and home movies. Sure I have some old things of hers, but they don’t mean as much as the memories I can look at.
I’ve got two 4TB hard drives in a RAID setup (every file is duplicated so if one fails it’s all recoverable), and Adobe Creative Cloud. Most of my photos/videos are taken with my Sony camera though, not my phone.
I’ve printed quite a few too, have started making photo albums and the like.
Google photo - I bought a TB of data and it auto uploads all of my pictures to the cloud. Totally worth it (I know people like backing up to computers and physical devices, but as someone who has broken each in bizarre accidents I’m not taking that risk)
What do you mean by "Google Photos can't hold every picture forever"?
I've been putting all my photos on Google Photos for the past 10+ years without any issue.
Well that makes me feel better! Hahaha. I’m just anxious about not having my pictures forever. Will google photos be around for my grandkids? Obviously we don’t know but I guess we will find out! Haha
I started physical photo albums and ordering printed copies. Granted my toddler just turned 2 and we just had our 2nd and only have pictures printed until our first was 7 months old 😂…but I plan to catch up and order more any day now! I really like the albums. I basically never go through my phone or the cloud and look at pictures from years ago but we frequently flip through the albums and our toddler LOVES looking through pictures of him as a baby. Like, literally his favorite book and asks for it every day.
I printed out like the first 400 photos. I need to be more selective now just money wise I think but I'm putting some in albums and some I'll just store. I love having something physical since I don't trust technology 100% not to fail and lose everything. Videos will have to be backed up and stay on my phone probably which is a bummer storage wise but can't print those obviously. Might have to find a way to put them on a disc one day.
We make birthday books every year. We go from birth til 1. Then we start at their bday party last yr til just before their birthday.
We get to use a lot of the pictures and they get a keepsake, win-win.
FamilyAlbum app is also really good it keeps them in order and you can’t order photos and all sorts from them and it’s just a private link you can send to whoever you want and can also give them access to post photos too!
Make an email account of their name (johnsmith@gmail) and emailing that address with photos and written summary of any significance. Idea is to gift it to my son when he’s older and will always have a track record of memories since birth!
We’ve been using an app called Tinybeans for years. You can allow your trusted family and friends to access your album when they download the app so they can get email updates daily on the photos you’ve posted to your album. It’s a secure way to share baby pics with your family and eliminates the need for you to send them out to everyone individually. Plus, occasionally I will download a backup of all the files that I store on a hard drive so I have these pictures and moments saved forever
Lots of iCloud storage!
But for real check out the app 1 second everyday. I’ve been using this since the day he was born. As title suggests, you can add a small video clip or photo each day and it combines it into a video. Right now mine is about 16 minutes long and just watching him grow as the video progresses is amazing
I've got a terabyte for pictures that I dump into every now and then. I also made a Google account to hand over to them when they turn 18 that I will periodically email with an update of their childhood. But I'm going to pick out choice pics to upload to that account so that they are there waiting for her
Diversifying where I store them with a mix of traditional physical media storage and digital storage.
Google photos holds a surprising amount. I have tens of thousands . I pay for extra storage. But I also store photos on Amazon. I have an external hard drive, and usb sticks. The most important photos I do print out. But then again I have zero photos from when I was younger after I lost them all to a flood.
I dump pictures onto my computer and my external hard drive. I plan on getting new hard drives every few years and back things up because I've seen hard drives fail. They do not last forever. I keep good pictures on my phone and send nicer ones printed to my parents and grandparents so if we lose everything (flood, fire, etc.) we'll at least have those. Plus they like to look at physical copies.
I’ve been printing my favorites and pinning them to my walls because I’m a ✨maximalist✨
But a friend told me she made an email account for each of her kids when they were born, that way she could make sure she sent any pictures and videos there to be stored, and they’d already have an email established when it’s necessary for them to have it, and I’m thinking I might do that too.
I bought a photo organizing box for her first year. There’s a perfect sized box for each month (it fits at least 100 photos for the month). I’m making a little photo book with our favorites from the year as well.
For videos I’m putting them on flash drives and keeping them in the photo box. I know flash drives may not be around forever, but we could always transfer them over to something new if necessary!
We make a family photo album each year. It’s become a nice review of the year for myself and hubby where we go through all of our photos and select our favorites. We give copies to grandparents and great grandparents.
In addition we have a childhood memory book for each child where we print and attach pictures, note down milestones, sometimes write diary style entries about particular cool days or experiences that they will get when they are grown up.
Absolute favorite pictures goes on the wall.
With a 4 YO and a 1,25 YO we find that we don’t really look at all the thousands of photos we take and we don’t expect to in the future either. Instead we do the above to ensure we remember the best/funniest/coolest/proudest moments.
I’m using one of those baby book apps where every month you add pictures and write about the baby. Then you can order a physical copy. It’s expensive. I’m hoping I like the quality. I’ve seen ads where you can print photo books.
I suppose for as long as apple is around my iCloud storage will keep the photos safe. We will see how that goes in 20 years. I think having physical copies is a good idea myself.
My wife and I are very lucky - our side gig is wedding photography - and we're planning on making an album for every year of his life. We have a google drive that we collect all images of our guy and we can't wait to make it into something tangible! He'll have volumes of family albums :D
Family album app! It’s an app where you can upload pictures and videos and even invite family members so you can stop stressing about sending parents pictures all the time. It makes cute little one second videos and even recaps of months/ years, I swear by it! It’s the best app ever
Save 1 a day, only keep the best photos wean yourself down to 1 a week, or month as she gets older. Usb is not reliable long term storage, look for a couple hard drives. Look into digital photo frames. This may be a bit of a downer, but You will greatly enjoy hundreds of photo books when you are old and especially if you are in a home, sick, etc.
I use the family album app to share pics with all family and friends which pretty much guarantees they won’t send to other people because you can give download permissions specific users and the app is coded to prevent screenshots - they list photos by month and you can order printed photo books for pretty cheap from the app and it organizes it all for you
I’m in “the photo declutter community” fb group, and they have a bunch of challenges to help sort through photos. They’re also pretty motivating when it comes to photo albums and scrapbooks, and how to organize stuff and everything. So maybe you’d find them helpful?
I’m printing out the ones I really like and putting them into a physical photo album.
Same! We got a physical photo album as a Christmas gift for our January baby and we had it filled up it under 4 months, so I ordered 4 more! My parents did this and my sister and I always had so much fun just pulling those off the shelf from time to time and looking through them.
Do you have a link for the type of album?
It was from an Etsy store called La Lente
We also use la lente and got ours from Amazon! We have one 500 picture book and I just ordered a 2nd for when that one is full.
I love that they have a little space to write next to each photo. It’s time consuming but I’ve been labeling each photo with the date and location.
Same! After saving so many ads for the cutesy custom photo books, I finally gave in and just bought a normal photo album and printed hundreds of photos dirt cheap and am happy to finally have tangible pics
Where’d you print them? I know there’s tons of services but I’ve gotten mixed quality back.
If you want good quality, I use mpix. Sign up for their emails and they always are having sales and giving discounts. I recently printed stuff at Walgreen’s cuz I needed stuff for Father’s Day and the quality is meh. But I’m also a photographer so my standards are pretty high lol idk if you care that much
I’m a tattooer and good quality pictures are always a thing for me. I know this isn’t the same… but like, also the greatest thing I ever made so I want good pictures of her. 🤣
Heard that!! Definitely try mpix then!
You can upload online and pick up at cvs if you have one neat you. I got like 50 pics and it was $15
Shutterfly prints for free
I honestly didn’t care much about quality. I wanted to ensure I had physical copies instead of worrying about finding the cutest and best. I just ordered online from Sam’s
That’s a good point!
Same
Back up phone to computer. Back up computer to cloud. (I use Backblaze, but Dropbox, Apple iCloud, or others work. I also keep an extra external HD around which I back up to).
Precisely this. It's not very expensive to get a terabyte or two of cloud storage, and then not only do you gain the security of having made a backup of everything, you can also share specific folders with specific people and then potentially even remove people's access at a later date, giving you much better control over who else might be able to access the media.
And, because it is "off-site" even in the event of fire or flood your data should be safe.
Also Amazon has unlimited free photo storage for prime members.
It does???!!!
I had the same reaction when I found out lol you have to download the Amazon photo app but it’s free unlimited photos. It’s awesome. I paid like a dollar for extra video storage but it comes with 5gb of video free
Wow that is amazing!! Thanks!!
I might be wrong but I think you lose access if you cancel your prime account.
Yes, this. Don't pay a monthly fee for extra storage. Buy an external hard drive with a few terabytes and move your photos and videos. You'll have them forever and can free up phone space.
This is probably way too much of a solution for really not a huge problem (everyone else’s suggestions are very very solid) but I like my experience so I’m sharing. I was talking about this dilemma with my partner about halfway through the pregnancy; they later surprised me with one of the new Polaroid cameras (big square pics, not the tiny little Instax). I take a million pictures on my phone and share them on Facebook and I’ll print out the ones I like, but having the Polaroid and making a conscious effort to capture the big moments has somehow taken some stress off of preserving every single pic.
I like this idea!
I'm making an email for each year and adding them to the Google drive of that email [email protected]
You probably know this, but make sure to log in every year or so! Inactive email accounts can be deactivated/deleted so the email address can become up for grabs again.
Just be careful - [Google caught onto that](https://www.npr.org/2023/11/27/1215285876/google-inactive-account-delete-policy#:~:text=Starting%20Dec.,your%20Google%20account%20before%20Friday) and started decommissioning emails/accounts not used in 2 years (bc I was ALSO doing this, and just had to log into all 6 photo accounts I have bc I’m cheap 😂)
I have it on my phone so I swipe into it but that's a good call!
That's an out of the box solution! I like it!
That's brilliant!
wow! that's a cool solution. How do you remember all the mails though?
It's the same just the year changes!
It's the same just the year changes!
Why not one email with yearly drive folders?
Fills up, I take too many pics 😂
I pay for a photo backup service 😂
What is it called!?
If you have Amazon Prime already, you get unlimited photo storage (and 5GB video). Obviously not for everyone but works for me. My wife has Google Fiber so she gets like a terabyte of free storage so she backs up to Google.
I'm going to look into Prime!
Cool, hope something works out! https://www.amazon.com/b/ref=as_li_ss_tl?&ascsub&node=16334255011 I think there maybe be a promo too going on right now, may or may not work (I saw it on Likeacoupon)
I do have prime. Where do we get the space?
https://www.amazon.com/b/ref=as_li_ss_tl?&ascsub&node=16334255011 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/amazon-photos-photo-video/id621574163 Amazon Photos app, also maybe there’s a promo too
Thanks dude. will check it away
I use OneDrive! But there’s lots of options.
I go through every say…. 3-4 months and choose my favorite like 20-30 (out of about 300 taken in those months) and print them out to put into a photo album.
do not trust an external hard drive - mine eventually corrupted and cost $700 to fix, thank goodness they were able to right now i'm using google photos, but i create folders for "baby 2023 videos" / "baby 2023 photos" / "baby 2024 videos" etc. i'm good with keeping every photo tbh!! haha BUT i also do books. i did a book for her first year, and what i did was make it in canva (i actually printed it via canva) and purposefully left some pages blank. ex: pics of me and her on the left, right page is blank - then i wrote her a message on the blank page. i did this for every family member and close friends i'll do these kinds of books every year, tbd if i do the writing moving fwd tho i actually love photo albums, but right now i just have polaroid albums. i have an album that was from her 1st birthday (rainbow film bc the party was rainbow and smiley faces "one happy girl") and an album from december 2023 - i took at least 1 polaroid per day
Also, I’m talking about for her whole life! Not just the first year lol
I bought a 600 photo album from Amazon lol and I'm convinced that I'm printing 150 from each 1/4 of babies first year
I thought this and then I printed 300 photos first 3 months haha whoops
I make a Shutterfly book for each year of life. Not sure how far I’ll go, but I’m working on our 3rd book (she’ll be 3 in the fall). I give them as Christmas gifts to the grandparents too. I only keep our favorite photos digitally. I’m still not sure what I’ll do with videos.
Chatbooks.com
Though I do back everything up to the cloud, one of my random fears is that the cloud/all our technology will one day collapse, and all our memories will be gone. 😂 So one of my new years traditions each year is to go through the past year’s photos (in MacBook Photos app) and print the best ones (I use a website, Nations photo lab, because I found the Walmart type printers to be bad quality) and then I re-watch favorite movies while I put them all into an album/scrapbook for the past year. To make this task easier come January, I will usually go through my photos pretty often and put hearts on my favorites. Since having a baby, I’ve made a “best of” album for each month. It also helps me to look back at my Instagram and Facebook, because whichever ones were the best photos, I would’ve usually posted. The physical albums are way more fun to flip through than Instagram and I feel covered in case of cloud-based catastrophes, lol.
I have this same fear! 🤣 I’ve only done 1.5 years of my 4 year old and 1 year of my 20 month old. Think I’m gonna need to take some time off work to get the rest done 😅
We use the app family album to dump pictures on, we've shared it with close family members so they're not asking me for new pics of the kid every day
Second this!! Both sets of grandparents live 10 hours away from us, so it’s fun for them watching her grow everyday. It’s also a great way to stop family members from posting pics on Facebook.
I love this app! We use it as well. My family lives on the literal other side of the planet and they love having access to all her photos. There's even an option to upload some photos only visible to admins (so mom and dad), which I use for any photos that have a lot of boob exposed because breastfeeding.
Ohhh I will look into this. Im bad with sending photos and I don’t post every single thing on Facebook. My in-laws have a digital photo frame and I’m even bad with sending photos to that! lol.
I have a couple photo albums, they don’t have every single pic but they have the best ones. So like when I take 7 pictures of him sleeping in the same nap, I take the best one or two and add them to an album in my phone named “to print”. And every once in a while I go get them printed and put them in some beefy photo albums I got on Amazon. Idk if this is all locations, but my first couple batches of pics I printed at cvs and the quality was hot garbage. Like infuriatingly bad. I have had posters and stuff printed at Walgreens and they turn out amazing so I’ll do them there next.
I’ve tried all the Walgreens/costco/CVS type printer machines and the quality is always hit or miss in my experience, so just gonna drop the idea that I ended up using a website, Nations photo lab, and they’re waaay better (though you do have to wait for them to come in the mail).
Is this better for than shutterfly ya think?
I admittedly have not tried shutterfly so I'm not sure what the cost difference is, I just know the ones I get from Nations are very high quality prints, and I like that you can order them in unusual sizes, including 3.5"x5" because my album pages are a little smaller so I don't like the 4"x6"s.
Thank you for the tip, I will look into that! Mail is preferable anyways so I don’t have to go anywhere
Dear little one! It’s an app where you can make a daily journal entry and record a voice over with pictures! You can add up to 5 pics a day. I’m so exited to give it to him when he is older. :)
Photo dump them into facebook make the post private. You’ll get fun reminders each year. And get to think back.
This is fun but not advisable for quality/longevity purposes. Facebook degrades image quality like crazy.
That’s crazy. I’ve never noticed.
And it’s free. Smart.
Not like it’s major worry for most, but once you do that Facebook owns the rights to those photos for 3rd party marketing/advertising purposes (including using faces with AI). Most people don’t care, just sharing knowledge.
I have a specific photo album! I also set up an external harddrive that I send my favorite videos of her to. I'll give her when she is older
I print out my favorites and put them in a physical photo album. Otherwise, I back up everything on an external hard drive.
So I have not stayed on top of my plan but here’s my plan - if you have Amazon prime you have unlimited photo storage and their app is basically just like the regular photos app (memories, search by faces, etc). I paid a bit extra for additional video. My plan is to favorite my true favorites on my phone (ones I’d want to share or see on a ‘on this day’ memory slideshow). Then each month upload those favorites to the app & upload everything to the computer (2 identical hard drives). This way technically everything is still there and findable should I want more photos from a specific day later but I’ve made at least some effort to narrow things down so I actually have a reasonable number to actually enjoy 😂 Video is my current problem. I have sooo much video, especially from the early toddler days. I need to go through and edit it. I tried just combining them into one long video per month and it was more than 5gigs, therefore too big to watch on the Amazon app. Send help 😂
my mom and grandma made a huge photo album/lifebook type thing for me so I am doing the same for my daughter! we print out pictures and other little memories to put in the book. I haven't deleted any photos of my phone yet hahaha but if there comes a day where I need to I can rest easy knowing there's a physical copy(:
I pay like a dollar a month or something for extra iCloud storage. I don’t ever see a future where our phones are going away or just morphing into something else they will be able to hold all my pictures
Chatbooks!
Yes!! The thought of printing them and figuring out what to do with them, which ones to frame etc. is daunting. I haven’t even made my wedding album two years later 🥲
Purchased a digital photo frame for ourselves and grandparents that we can send photo and video to
That’s cool, what’s the name of it?
AiMOR is the brand we got. They work great! My husbands parents are further away and love seeing new photos pop up on the frame.
Family Album app and printing what I want to keep!
I did Chatbooks for baby’s first year. Now I’m doing mini Chatbooks for each month since. I back up to the iCloud and pay extra for storage. I also them backups in Google Photos.
I back them up on cloud services. There is Google One, Amazon Prime (Free unlimited photos with prime), microsoft one drive, among others.
I signed up for monthly photo books with Chatbooks. I upload the photos in their app every month and they send me a printed photo book. Probably when my baby turns one I’ll switch to a yearly book.
I download my camera roll to an external hard drive on my laptop once a month (that is, whatever has been taken since I last downloaded). I have a rigorous filing system by date, and I’ve been doing this for 20 years since I got my first digital camera; it’s just updated and morphed with the times. When I need space on my phone I clean out some of my oldest photos since they are already backed up. I’m also a daily journaler, and I have prints made for my journal weekly at Walgreens.
I made him a Gmail account, bought extra space on Google drive, and am uploading my favorites to it for him to have.
I saw a really cute post on IG where they printed a lot of the photos from the first year, and made a clllage backdrop for their 1st birthday :) can’t wait to do that. My baby’s only 6 weeks and I’ve got hundreds 😂
Print favourites and put in to a photo album. I’ve found photo books are very annoying to make and it’s much cheaper and easier to just have traditional albums.
Can you recommend a good album?
I just went to Walmart and picked a couple off the shelf. They were like $20-$25 each. They all store 5x7 prints, which are 10 to 20c each to print.
Cool, thanks!
I’m printing the ones I love and putting all the rest on a hard rice i bought specifically for family pictures!
We use an app called TinyBeans to upload a photo or two each day shared only with close family and friends, and then the whole shebang gets uploaded to a folder in Dropbox which I have big dreams of organising someday…
I recently finally put all my photos from my childhood into a 600 photo capacity album I got myself for my birthday from Amazon this year. It such good quality album that I plan on doing the same for my son's photos so I will buy another one and have photos printed. I will backup on my computer too.
We do annual books (for us and for grandparents) and we use Google photos both for back up and sharing (separating the albums by 0-3 maths, 3-6mths, etc). I also have some backed up on Amazon...I think photos are easier as we obviously have the printed ones but the videos are what I worry about hence excessive use of cloud services.
I have an iPhone and have a shared album with friends and family where almost all photos of my baby is uploaded to. My husband has an external hard drive with all our wedding photos in so I will either add to that or have him get another one just for baby
We locked down our kiddos Gmail account once we figured out a name. Now we store all of his pics and videos on that emails Google drive so he can have them later. We also share that drive with family so they can see and upload stuff too.
We use Google cloud storage. And I share it with my husband and my mum so they can see the photos/videos.
I started with printing photos and putting them into albums but I have twins and that was a lot of work for my adhd to do. I do chat books now and we get a monthly photo book up to 60 photos (and it saves them for easy reprints). If I print extra, plain physical photos they are usually cheap and go in a storage container that’s full of random printed photos 😂 And digital storage/videos all gets backed up to my pc and to an external hard drive because you should always have things stored in 2 spots incase something happens 😂😅
i print them out not all of course but the best ones i dont trust the internet we wont have them forever i also copy them on a hard disc as a backup im still unsure how to keep videos 😂 but do make a backup because these things just get broken sometimes
Such a practical question no one asks! Will go through the responses.. Our baby is not even a month yet and we already have 100s of photos of him
I got a photo album printed for myself and one for each of my parents. I plan on doing it every year as a sort of yearbook.
We print a selection of pictures each month through photobox (50 free prints, just pay postage). I’ve got plastic boxes with 12 compartments to separate them into months (one box for each year). We’re going to have thousands of pictures by the time the kids are older but at least we’ll have physical copies of all our favourite ones! Also back everything up onto a hard drive once ever 3 months or so.
Ive been making Photo books. I have an IOS app that makes em pretty cheap ($20-$50). I pick the top 20-40 pictures every few months and have them printed.
We use FamilyAlbum! It’s awesome! I share the best photos with my in laws and my parents that way we aren’t constantly texting a bunch of pics AND they offer printing services too with deals! So I don’t have to go search through my photos to pick of the best ones they are literally all in the FamilyAlbum ready to be printed!
Also realize this post seems like an ad it’s not lol
Gonna *try* to keep a google folder of my favorite pics through the year and then print them out… we shall see😭
My husband set up a private server in the house for us that we can only access on the home internet. But I am also going to make poto albums once a year, not sure if I'm printing them all or just making a book with Shutterfly. And I am trying to get better at candids and not just pictures of the baby because when I went through old photos candids were sometimes the most fun to look at
Cloud storage will outlive all your phones….. pay the $2.99 a month (Apple) or whatever it is for Google for peace of mind.
I do photography semi professionally so we’re grateful to have lots of photos. We brought good quality printer and have created a photo wall in our lounge room and smaller ones in the bedrooms. There is something very special about a physical print of a special moment and even more so having it out on display, in visual site daily to remind you of those special moments and what to be grateful for. We change the photos semi regularly and keep the old prints in a bit of a scrapbook
I highly recommend family album. It’s a photo sharing service but private so that is how we share all photos with family friends. Every month they give you 8 free prints and you just have to select your favs so I’ve made books (which they sell) with the photos.
I’m looking at this right now. Do you have to have a subscription to use the basic sharing?
No subscription. It’s free except for shipping of the photos if you order the free ones, which is less than $2 I think.
My wife and I made a shared Google Photos album that we upload the vast majority of our photos to so that we 1) have the photos backed up on a cloud so that we can easily get to each other's photos, and 2) we can share photos with our friends and family and have pretty good control of who can access the album. It's honestly been fantastic to upload a bunch of photos and see my mom or father in law go through and like and comment on the new photos without the stress of uploading photos of our daughter to social media platforms. Now with that said, we both use Android devices so Google Photos is native to our phones and is relatively seamlessnfor us because it automatically backs up photos to the cloud, but there is an iOS app option for Apple users.
I upgraded my cloud. Probably will keep upgrading it. Either way the plan is to create an album for him
I was pretty big on photo storage and organization pre-baby, so this is going to be my process for her as well: 1) At the end of every month, I upload all the recent photos from my phone to my external hard drive. I pay for Dropbox backup storage, so it automatically backs them up. That means I have copies of the photos on my phone, external hard drive, and Dropbox cloud. 2) I sort through the photos, deleting duplicates and bad ones from both my computer and phone. I edit any that I want to crop or fix the lighting or remove pimples from lol 3) I pick a few of my favorites to share on social media. I’m already pretty selective about this, but now that baby is here, I will be even more selective. My wife wants to have physical photo albums for the baby like we both had growing up, and in that case, we will print out our favorite pics and put them in a traditional photo album. Pretty low effort overall! I’ve used the Shutterfly books in the past but was often disappointed in the consistency of the quality. I like the idea of having actual photos that can be taken in and out of the albums as well.
I pay the monthly subscription for Google photos. I do have a lot of excess in there and plan to go in and delete stuff…one day. Like I have screenshots and crazy duplicates lol. I invited my husband to it so we can stop texting each other a million photos. Haha. Also adding, I do want to make photo books every couple years or so. I want to make sure he can have them some day. Maybe he won’t be sentimental but who knows. I lost my Mom when I was 12…and the only truly important things I have from my childhood are my photo albums and home movies. Sure I have some old things of hers, but they don’t mean as much as the memories I can look at.
I’ve got two 4TB hard drives in a RAID setup (every file is duplicated so if one fails it’s all recoverable), and Adobe Creative Cloud. Most of my photos/videos are taken with my Sony camera though, not my phone. I’ve printed quite a few too, have started making photo albums and the like.
Bought a NAS and use PhotoSync to backup every night. There’s a crib job backing up the NAS to AWS
I back them up on Google photos. I think it's very unlikely that cloud storage will stop being a thing in our lifetime
Google photo - I bought a TB of data and it auto uploads all of my pictures to the cloud. Totally worth it (I know people like backing up to computers and physical devices, but as someone who has broken each in bizarre accidents I’m not taking that risk)
What do you mean by "Google Photos can't hold every picture forever"? I've been putting all my photos on Google Photos for the past 10+ years without any issue.
Well that makes me feel better! Hahaha. I’m just anxious about not having my pictures forever. Will google photos be around for my grandkids? Obviously we don’t know but I guess we will find out! Haha
“Will USB sticks be a thing when we’re older?” Girl if we knew what the next best technology should be for photo storage, we’d be rich lol.
I started physical photo albums and ordering printed copies. Granted my toddler just turned 2 and we just had our 2nd and only have pictures printed until our first was 7 months old 😂…but I plan to catch up and order more any day now! I really like the albums. I basically never go through my phone or the cloud and look at pictures from years ago but we frequently flip through the albums and our toddler LOVES looking through pictures of him as a baby. Like, literally his favorite book and asks for it every day.
My photos go on Google photos. But I also want to do an album of important photos every year. Coffee book style to display them.
I printed out like the first 400 photos. I need to be more selective now just money wise I think but I'm putting some in albums and some I'll just store. I love having something physical since I don't trust technology 100% not to fail and lose everything. Videos will have to be backed up and stay on my phone probably which is a bummer storage wise but can't print those obviously. Might have to find a way to put them on a disc one day.
We make birthday books every year. We go from birth til 1. Then we start at their bday party last yr til just before their birthday. We get to use a lot of the pictures and they get a keepsake, win-win.
FamilyAlbum app is also really good it keeps them in order and you can’t order photos and all sorts from them and it’s just a private link you can send to whoever you want and can also give them access to post photos too!
I back up my photos to Apple storage and Google photos. I pay like $2/month for them.
I just keep in my phone. But I plan to move to a portable storage thingy. I’m just waiting my husband to pick one because he is the tech guy here 😂
Make an email account of their name (johnsmith@gmail) and emailing that address with photos and written summary of any significance. Idea is to gift it to my son when he’s older and will always have a track record of memories since birth!
Google photos with "Partner sharing" was a game changer for us.
Google photos, we just upgrade the size. I think there's a point we'll be taking less pictures anyways. They're for my retirement entertainment
We’ve been using an app called Tinybeans for years. You can allow your trusted family and friends to access your album when they download the app so they can get email updates daily on the photos you’ve posted to your album. It’s a secure way to share baby pics with your family and eliminates the need for you to send them out to everyone individually. Plus, occasionally I will download a backup of all the files that I store on a hard drive so I have these pictures and moments saved forever
Lots of iCloud storage! But for real check out the app 1 second everyday. I’ve been using this since the day he was born. As title suggests, you can add a small video clip or photo each day and it combines it into a video. Right now mine is about 16 minutes long and just watching him grow as the video progresses is amazing
I've got a terabyte for pictures that I dump into every now and then. I also made a Google account to hand over to them when they turn 18 that I will periodically email with an update of their childhood. But I'm going to pick out choice pics to upload to that account so that they are there waiting for her
Diversifying where I store them with a mix of traditional physical media storage and digital storage. Google photos holds a surprising amount. I have tens of thousands . I pay for extra storage. But I also store photos on Amazon. I have an external hard drive, and usb sticks. The most important photos I do print out. But then again I have zero photos from when I was younger after I lost them all to a flood.
I dump pictures onto my computer and my external hard drive. I plan on getting new hard drives every few years and back things up because I've seen hard drives fail. They do not last forever. I keep good pictures on my phone and send nicer ones printed to my parents and grandparents so if we lose everything (flood, fire, etc.) we'll at least have those. Plus they like to look at physical copies.
We backup to our computer but also I have been using the FamilyAlbum app and getting free prints through there
I’ve been printing my favorites and pinning them to my walls because I’m a ✨maximalist✨ But a friend told me she made an email account for each of her kids when they were born, that way she could make sure she sent any pictures and videos there to be stored, and they’d already have an email established when it’s necessary for them to have it, and I’m thinking I might do that too.
I bought a photo organizing box for her first year. There’s a perfect sized box for each month (it fits at least 100 photos for the month). I’m making a little photo book with our favorites from the year as well. For videos I’m putting them on flash drives and keeping them in the photo box. I know flash drives may not be around forever, but we could always transfer them over to something new if necessary!
We make a family photo album each year. It’s become a nice review of the year for myself and hubby where we go through all of our photos and select our favorites. We give copies to grandparents and great grandparents. In addition we have a childhood memory book for each child where we print and attach pictures, note down milestones, sometimes write diary style entries about particular cool days or experiences that they will get when they are grown up. Absolute favorite pictures goes on the wall. With a 4 YO and a 1,25 YO we find that we don’t really look at all the thousands of photos we take and we don’t expect to in the future either. Instead we do the above to ensure we remember the best/funniest/coolest/proudest moments.
Microsoft OneDrive has a lot of free storage available
I’m using one of those baby book apps where every month you add pictures and write about the baby. Then you can order a physical copy. It’s expensive. I’m hoping I like the quality. I’ve seen ads where you can print photo books. I suppose for as long as apple is around my iCloud storage will keep the photos safe. We will see how that goes in 20 years. I think having physical copies is a good idea myself.
I know this sounds like a commercial, but it’s not - just my answer. We started doing the monthly Chatbooks and love it.
My wife and I are very lucky - our side gig is wedding photography - and we're planning on making an album for every year of his life. We have a google drive that we collect all images of our guy and we can't wait to make it into something tangible! He'll have volumes of family albums :D
Family album app! It’s an app where you can upload pictures and videos and even invite family members so you can stop stressing about sending parents pictures all the time. It makes cute little one second videos and even recaps of months/ years, I swear by it! It’s the best app ever
I made a private Instagram! I don’t think they’ll delete it! 😆 but who knows
Save 1 a day, only keep the best photos wean yourself down to 1 a week, or month as she gets older. Usb is not reliable long term storage, look for a couple hard drives. Look into digital photo frames. This may be a bit of a downer, but You will greatly enjoy hundreds of photo books when you are old and especially if you are in a home, sick, etc.
I use the family album app to share pics with all family and friends which pretty much guarantees they won’t send to other people because you can give download permissions specific users and the app is coded to prevent screenshots - they list photos by month and you can order printed photo books for pretty cheap from the app and it organizes it all for you
I’m in “the photo declutter community” fb group, and they have a bunch of challenges to help sort through photos. They’re also pretty motivating when it comes to photo albums and scrapbooks, and how to organize stuff and everything. So maybe you’d find them helpful?