What is the best way to manage your vacation photos?
So you have spent a fortune on having the best family holidays with your kids, it may have exceeded well over $5,000! So your back you have caught up with friends and family and told them about the trip with the kids, promised you will share some photos, maybe by facebook, flickr or some other social media photo sharing site very soon. Three months has passed since returning and you still haven’t shared or done anything with those photos, sound familiar?
So how do you overcome this problem of storing thousands of memories from family vacations on the computer or even worse still on the memory card? Which photos are keepers, which photos are worth sharing with family and friends and what photos do you want to archive?
Our advice would be to act quickly when you return home get into the photos within 1 week of returning, put aside a good two hours to work through the photos. There are lot of great programs to manage your photos I personally like using the Picasa from Google, it allows you to work on the photos offline and share those photos you want to share online. Tag your photos for easy identification, I like to use tags that identify the people in the photo, destination, event, month, year, and favourite. Now when it comes to sharing some people will be interested in seeing photos of the kids, some will be interested in photos of the destination and events, others will want to see your attempt at being arty farty, so be sure to select a range of pictures that might cover a broad spectrum of the vacation with the family. However don’t share them all i.e. more than 30 plus! You don’t want to bore your family and friends. So how do you share your photos what is the easiest way to share, do you share them online or do you prefer to print and share when you catch up in person. It really is horses for courses. Personally I’m a share online or via my sweet little net book, or ipod. Recently a family member presented a great little book which they did online for few dollars, it was pictures of the holidays with comments printed into simple book. What a great idea for gifting, it really did remind me of the old photo album which has died away since the digital cameras have taken over.
Action to be taken with your family photos
- Work on your photos quickly on return from your holidays
- Ensure you have good program to organize and manage your photos
- Load, Identify, and tag your photos.
- Share and print photos
- Backup your photos on a external disc or drive
I’m no expert when it comes to family holiday photos, so what do you do with your pictures are you lazy and keep them buried, or are you proactive and share them and have them on display.
Let us know I would like to hear what tips you might have that you could share in a comment below.
I think the advice of getting right to it while it is fresh is absolutely the right approach. And use photo organization software. My wife and I prioritized over 2000 pictures we took on a family vacation to Disney and a cruise to Mexico down to a very nice facebook posting of 25. First of all I always go through and flag with 5 Stars (i use iphoto 08) any photos that are striking as great photos regardless of what they are about or who is in them. I am very fussy about the 5 star ratings and not a lot of photos that get it. other photos I like because of the situation (a memorable moment, or place, etc) or who is in it get the 4 star rating. To whittle the 2000 down, we went through and did our rankings and deleted anything that was just bad (like closed eyes, blurred shots, etc) when we sorted by 4 stars and above it pretty much came down to 250 which we put into a iphoto album called vacation favs. Going through that album a couple of times with family (you are absolutely right - any more than 25-50 and even family tunes out looking at pictures) and using the 5 star sort we put a target of 25 that told a nice short story of our vacation.
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