How often do you print pictures of your kids?

DH is under the impression that every family has their photos on their camera/CDs/harddrives/facebook and no one has actual photo albums anymore (either created with print photos the old fashioned way or printed into a book straight from a photo printing place). I disagree and I think people print pictures of their kids way more that we do, which is next to never. They are are all on a hard drive which makes me a bit nervous and we are going to back them up soon, some make it onto DH’s FB page.

Do you get around to printing them? Individual prints or directly into photo books? Do you take the time to organize your photos on your hard drive to weed out all of the lousy pics? Scrapbook them in an “artsy way” either digitally or after getting individual prints made? Do you only print professional ones but your amateur shots only get shared on FB?

Inquiring minds want to know. :biggrin:

I don’t print. I did once and the quality was horrific due to me using my old camera phone. The online images were just fine. I just upload them. But I cull them a lot first. I try not to take a dozen pics of the same thing. Or rather I do, then I delete and only keep the best ones.
My mum who lives in the other side of the world prints the ones she likes and makes a scrapbook each year.

I do edit most of my pics. First I crop them to square. I don’t know why. I liked square even before the whole Instagram phase. Most pics just get cropped. A few get edited more to adjust color or lighting. I have even has to remove someone’s arm from across the side of my sons face in a picture I really liked. All my pics instantly go from my phone to drop box now. I delete the ones I don’t want almost daily if I have been taking pics that day. And I only upload a few at a time too. So it is never really time consuming. Unless it is a birthday or Christmas Day. Then I have hundreds to sort through. I have about 300 pics for birthday and Christmas and I was able to cull them to about 50.

I do a bit of everything, I have tried to make a scrap book for my child’s first year, its ok but it was more time consuming than I thought it would be and doesn’t even look that good. So then I decided to make a online photoshop book. The book is all ready to print but I just havnt got around to paying for it yet.
I do print photos still cos I like to cut them up and make homemade books out of them and things like that. I also have a private side page on my facebook where I invite certain friends of mine and upload photos of my daughter all the time.
I should go through and delete photos off my hard drive and just save the best but there are so many, but for now I just store them in age files eg 0-3months, 4-7months, etc

I haven’t printed anything out for a very long time. I even bought a groupon coupon for a photo-book and let it expire without using it. If some crazy solar flare annihilated our computers, there would be little proof that my children ever existed. :blink:

Then again, I never was the artsy, scrapbooking type.

We print often for our grandparents – they love it. Sometimes ( once every 2-3 months) we print about 60-80 photos for ourselves, – it makes for a very nice family time to sit together with the photo book and talk about our family adventures :yes:

My husband also puts different selections of our family photos for slide show on our very large computer screen display – and it is nice to see children, always making comments to visitors on where the photos were taken. We have them going in our living room as a screen saver :slight_smile: E (3.5 yo) loves to comment each one – this is when we visited Hungary, that is in the Mosque in Turkey, this is from England, that is from Serbia lol So when we have our large floor map assembled, it also turns into a geography activity

Granted most of our photos are on the hard drives, we also trying to back them up on the DVDs, but it is a HUGE job… My husband is a photographer, and he has trunks and trunks of his photography art work, as well as photojournalism photos from different countries. So I would say we have both – digital photos and printed out ones. Lately however we printed way less then lets say 4-5 years ago.

I dont do scrap booking, I would say time is the issue and I have never been an artsy type… I always wanted to make scrapbooks of baby first years, now we are on baby # 3 and… have not done any yet :frowning: :rolleyes: I do photoshop photo cards for different occasions ( mainly with children nowadays), print them out and send them by mail, – like for Christmas, Birthdays, etc…

Never. Never ever ever. Well…maybe once or twice since my son was born and he’s now “four and three quarters” as he says :slight_smile: I think it’s all because I’m lazy…and now it’s to the point that there are too many to go back to to print off. (Is that a good excuse?) My son often asks if there are any pictures of him and the only pictures for him to hold are ones that I’ve put into word documents to make into books. So sad.

Not often. I print a few nice ones of each child off for grandparents and one aunt probably 3 times per year. I also do a small photo book for one grandmother for her birthday each year. I have a few books with photos for the kids to read but the most recent one that I did was 2 1/2 years ago :frowning: when my youngest was a baby. Definitely time to update those.

I did plan to do a photo album for each child’s first year. I have albums and lots of photos printed for my first 2 children (nothing for the third) and that is as far as I have got. Every so often I see them in my box of things that I really must do and think I really must do that…

I used to be very good at keeping all the photos on the computer in their proper month folders and deleting all the bad ones and than renumbering all the ones I was keeping. I think that went by the wayside with baby number 3 almost 3 years ago. Every so often I do try to do a big ‘clean out’ and also back everything up but definitely not as well as I used to.

No scrapbooking or anything like that. No time and no room. Guess I could do it digitally.

I love photo albums, so once or twice a year since digital cameras were invented I get several hundred photos printed & take a night to put them into an album chronologically. No scrapbooking - cutting & glueing horrifies me lol . Just a regular album but I love looking back through them after a few yrs. Much nicer to sit around & look at than on a laptop.

I went a bit overboard with my little boy, especially his 1st yr. I was definitely a first time mum who thought that scrawny little thing was the most gorgeous being on the planet… so I seem to have a lot of photos of him in the same position, which at the time must have looked very different but he had just moved a finger or something, in the same swing on the same afternoon :blush: .

He loves looking at the albums too though, which is nice. We live a long ways from family so I think it helps reinforce memories of special trips etc. He’s pretty careful with books but I wouldn’t let him loose near my computer on his own!

I so nearly lost everything once that I am pretty good at backing up every now & again.

I wish I printed at least one photo. My girl is 2 years old, I have thousands of pictures on my computer (hope it’ll never die), but I never have time to choose the best ones and print them. Hopefully when she grows up, I’ll print them out. It will be her wedding gift lol

Reading all of these makes me feel better I am not alone. :slight_smile: I am terrible about printing photos and apparently I am not the only one. I should just pic the best ones and outsource someone to make the books for me. lol

I used to scrapbook pre-children and it’s fun but toooooo time consuming now that I have kids. Even if I didn’t have kids now, I can think of better ways to spend my time. I like the idea of digital scrapbook though, or even just digital photo books.Something that I just can pop the photos in and have it pre-designed start to finish. I’d rather have it DONE that have it cutesy, individual, and personalized (i.e. NOT done because it’s not perfect). I decided to print a book for the kids first year and then maybe every other year thereafter but it’s one of those “I’ll do it when I have more time” activities. And “more time” never seems to materialize itself! Perhaps I’ll stop mentally whining about it and make it a priority in 2013. lol

I recently learned about Smash books on Pinterest. I’d love to try one on our next trip, this blog post is so inspiring! (Trying to convince DH we need to go to Disney in the Spring). The idea of taking a few minutes a night on a trip and slapping some stuff together in a book to come home to a finished masterpiece sounds WONDERFUL!

http://createwithsarah.blogspot.com/2011/06/smash-book-review.html

http://www.craftsunleashed.com/index.php/paper-crafts/smash-books-the-un-scrapbook/