Photo Book Design Corner ll Busy Moms & Dads

Lately,  we have been focusing on helping busy parents focus on preserving the past for their children. This week we introduce you to a mom who is adamant at just that — preserving her’s sons memories.

Meet Emily everyone.

Hello! My name is Emily! I am a wife, mommy to a crazy 18 month old, and photographer from Southern Indiana. I am an energetic, type A with a passion for keeping my plate as full as possible! The word “bored” is not even in my vocabulary! I love to live life and enjoy the crazy ride! My business, Emily Kay Studio, specializes in newborns, children, and families! I truly love what I do!

I have a few photographer friends who suggested that I use Adoramapix.com. I am always on the hunt for good quality, budget friendly, prints labs with great customer service. I have tried MANY other online labs for my photo books, and Printique has been the best overall quality in color, paper, and timely delivery that I have found. I refer all of my friends and clients to Printique without hesitation.

Organizing is something that I kind of enjoy. Remember, I am a Type A, with a capital A! I will admit, until my son was 1-year-old, I had not organized his photos. I had “big camera” images, cell phone images, images that people had e-mailed me, and professional family photos that I was in, all sitting on my desktop glaring at me. It was a constant overwhelming feeling of, “where do I start?” I ended up just pushing it off. I worried about somehow loosing them if I didn’t do something with them soon! I had a scare when I thought I had lost almost all of my cell phone images from my son’s birth to 12 months. Think about that for a moment. Because of my laziness, I could have lost EVERY picture from his birth. I had a slight panic attack, and decided to get myself in gear and start the process of organizing them to order. Here is what I do:

• Get a big cup of coffee.
• Get all of the photos into one place. I created files on my desktop and labeled them accordingly. (ex: Newborn photos, iphone photos, Family photos) Since it had been so long, I had multiple family photo sessions, and milestone sessions that I had done of my son. They each got their own folder with a date. 
• Next, I collected all of the images from online, disks, flash drives, cell phones, etc, and dragged and dropped into these folders. This allowed me to organize all of the images from different places into one spot. I sometimes delete some out at this point if they were pointless iphone captures that I don’t care to keep. No one wants to see screenshots of recipes and Pinterest ideas.
• After the folders were made and filled, I moved them to a spot in my pictures that I labeled, “My personal pictures.” This helps me keep them separate from my client files. 
• I feel very strongly about backing up my files. Once you have everything nice and organized, go ahead and upload them to an online storage gallery. That way, in the event that something happens to your computer, you will have back-ups of all of your images! I will keep pictures on my computer or on an external hard drive for about a year on top of the online storage, but I do a yearly computer cleaning to keep the files from dragging down my computer. With having an online back-up, you never have to worry about if you are about to delete your precious memories. Seriously, do it.

Being a photographer, urging clients to print their photos has become my mission. Even if you took the pictures with your iphone, they are still memories that you wanted to remember, or you wouldn’t have taken them. One of my favorite things to do is go to my mom’s house and look at our baby books. The memories are so neat to look back on. When you are 70 years old, sitting around your living room with your grand children, will you have anything to show from your past? Will you have to make up some excuse that, “back in your day”, it was only a digital age and no one did anything with their pictures? How sad would that be? It is up to us to take control of this digital world that we live in and print our memories now. If we don’t, we will regret it so much in the future! Make time to go through your pictures. Make time to order them. Make time to give them to relatives. One last thing, please, for the love of everything, do not go to 1 hour drug stores to print your beautiful images! If you are going to spend the money on professional images, take the time to order them from a professional lab. The color is better and the quality is better.

Photo books have been a lifesaver for me. Since I take WAY too many photos, it would be crazy for me to find a place to display all of them. What I have dedicated myself to do, is to create a photo book every 6 months. I set a timer on my phone to remind me that it has been 6 months, I do all of the steps above, and I order a book. It takes me a couple of hours, every 6 months. That is it. When you stay on top of it, it doesn’t seem like such a burden. My books are everything that happened in that time. Whether it was a family vacation, birthday, holiday, or just 6 months of iphone pictures. They are there. Every now and then, I will create special occasion books if I don’t want them to take over one of my other books. One really amazing feature of Adoramapix.com, is that you can re-order books with one click of a button. So, when grandma sees your book and decides that she needs a copy, it is easy peasy. Great Christmas presents!

Don’t let yourself get overwhelmed. I was really behind, and it only took me a weekend to accomplish. I gave the toddler to my husband and said, “have fun, see you tomorrow” and knocked it out! haha!  Thank you for asking me to share my thoughts. It is something I am very passionate about!