Protected: Hailey’s Belated Half B-day!
March 20, 20202020 In Review – DRAFT
January 1, 2021
How many pictures do you have on your devices and sitting in tubs that haven’t seen the light of day for years (maybe even decades!)? In my google photos account alone, I have over 40,000 pictures.
The memories feature has been so awesome to be able to remember past memories, but I wanted to do something with all of these pictures to be able to triage through them and share them in a thoughtful manner.
I started with Hailey’s first year photo book. When going back through my photos, I realized I sometimes had 50+ pictures taken of her in less than a half hour. It got a little overwhelming. I had to figure out a way to figure out what to use to put in the photobook. This is how I ended up doing it:
- I made a photo album folder in Google Photos of all the pictures I had for each month
- I then went month by month and created a second folder for that month of the pictures that I wanted to include in my photo book, trying to keep the number at 100 or less for each month (usually failing)
- Special events had their own folders/page
Once I had my pictures triaged, I needed to pick a way to do the photobook. I started out in Shutterfly, but didn’t love having to work online to do the book. I also wanted a little more freedom to play with the layout. I decided to try doing the book in Microsoft Publisher… it was great when my motivation was high but definitely time consuming and was not a sustainable effort.
After laying out a few months in Publisher and realizing it didn’t look cohesive, I decided to finish the book in Adobe Lightroom. I purchased the year creative cloud subscription (which as been great for editing pictures) so used that to finish my layouts.
I sent the photobook to Blurb and waited a couple days to get a 35% off photobook promotional code to use to print the book.
The book turned out so great!! Here’s a sneak peak at some of my favorite pages:
The next project I tackled was buying a new scanner. I ended up getting the Epson FastFoto. In one weekend, I scanned in thousands of pictures while watching Hamilton and the Vikings Game. The scanner was so great! It has an autofeed so I could just put a pile of pictures in and it would do the rest. I used 1200 dpi quality and had it set to auto scan the back side if there was writing on it. My next project is to sort through those and print out some photobooks.
Tips of scanning in huge amounts of photos/lessons learned:
- If you can get the pictures sorted into at least similar time frames, that is super helpful! I didn’t really spend any time sorting and just started scanning – looking back, sorting would’ve been great
- Use the highest quality you need for scanning, it takes up more time to scan and space for the file, but it is great for being able to enlarge pictures – I used the 1200 dpi
- Scan in as a lossless format, my scanner had a TIFF option (instead of JPG), this is important for any kind of editing and not losing data with resaving
- I ended up applying auto enhance to all of the pictures off the scanner – Epson’s software did a great job. (I do have my Lightroom subscription in case I need to tweak anything.. but I haven’t found a picture I needed to do that with yet)
- DO SOMETHING WITH THE PHOTOS!
- I currently have all of my photos autoback up to Google Photos and auto add faces to certain albums that are shared with my family so they can see pictures from our past 🙂
- I am going to make photobooks for people as time allows.
Photobooks I would like to create:
- Our wedding album
- A photo album of the Upkes family through all our high school years
- A college years book for all of my pictures
- A year book of the year’s Joel and I have been together
Wish me luck!!