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Do you have tons of digital photos and video clips hanging out with no where to go? From our early days of being professional photographers, the question we still get asked the most is “who do you recommend for… (prints, books, products, etc.)?” Hopefully we can take some of the guesswork out of how to preserve your stories for you with some of our favorite products and services.
If you are a mom, I know you are capturing lots of content on an everyday basis. Vacations, milestones, and big events only add to that growing pile of digital files. Highlights might make an appearance on social media, but what are you doing to preserve those memories for your family? You are taking the time to capture them. Below are some tools to give your children the tangible gift of those moments you get to share with them. No matter the age or stage, I hope that we can bring you some guidance with the products and services we love to share with our kiddos.
Back Up Your Memories
Before you do anything, back up your memories!! You want to make sure that you are backing things up regularly and keeping those files organized. We recommend a combination of multiple hard drives and / or online storage… the key being “multiple” locations. Plan to set aside some time each month to go through those files. It’s a little less overwhelming that way. You can read more about all of that here.
Once you are confident that those memories are secure in multiple locations, you can move on to really sharing and preserving those stories.
Blog
Blogging is a way to share your heart with your children as they grow in real time. Can you imagine being able to read your mom’s heart as she was raising you? To realize what her greatest joys and struggles were? To realize that you are most likely experiencing the exact same thing with your kids that she once went through with you?
I tend to be a pretty private person, but when we first started asking questions about adoption, a family member suggested that I start a blog. Not crazy about the idea, I realized it had it’s benefits, keeping family and friends informed. As time went on, I realized that it was a way for me to really process life through words… something that I’ve found to be really cathartic. Not only that, those events and emotions are now chronicled for my children as they grow up.
If you are interested in blogging, especially on a personal level for your growing family, I highly recommend exposure.co. We started out with a free wordpress blog, but discovered Exposure as we began our second adoption. It is super simple to use, provides a polished & professional looking site, makes adding photos a breeze, and keeps your stories all in one place. Photos are the star of the show with options for full-width or gallery style images while still giving you lots of options for text placement for telling your story. It is the site I use personally to this day for preserving our family’s stories.
If you’d like to give Exposure a try, you can use code “jandie12302001” for 30% off.
Artwork
Our favorite place for printing photos? Mpix.com. They are the consumer end of a professional printing lab and haven’t disappointed us yet. The prices are reasonable and the quality is outstanding. And if you are printing your own wallet size images, they round their corners, giving a more professional feel than the kind you cut out yourself.
Mpix also offers quality canvas, standout, wood, metal, and already framed prints making the journey from a digital file to artwork for your walls super simple.
This might be super random and only in our part of the world, but have you looked in to your public library for printing? Our county library has a print shop that we have access to. For something like $2 per linear foot, you can print some amazing poster size prints and decorate a room for next to nothing. Before you commit to paying a lot for large prints for your walls or next event, try giving your local library a call. It can’t hurt.
Custom Books
As much as I love blogging and creating art for your walls as ways to preserve your stories, neither is really tangible for your children. That is where these next options come in to play.
Board Books
For the littlest littles in your life, I can not say enough good things about Pint Size Productions. We used these books for our kids as our introduction to our family while they were still living half a world away. We knew a board book could survive a toddler’s daily use and the quality on the craftsmanship is great. They offer easy drag and drop options to customize your book or you can completely design from scratch. These are perfect when you are just starting out with a young family and the books will stand the test of time as your family grows.
Chatbooks
If there is one company I could rave about forever, it is Chatbooks. Do you know about these? A friend introduced me a few years ago and it has been my book of choice ever since. The print quality is top-notch (and we care a lot), the books are well made, and the customer service is phenomenal.
Why do we love Chatbooks? For life as a busy mom, this company could not make creating photo books more simple. You get to choose your photo source (social media, online storage, camera roll, etc.), and they literally can fill and print themselves. With the Ongoing Book Series option, once a book is full with your tagged photos, they print automatically and ship giving your kids easy access to your favorite family memories.
The price is right where it needs to be – accessible to families. With some of our books, I place them away on shelves, waiting for older hands that aren’t as likely to tear precious pages. With these, it’s not going to break the bank if a page gets torn. AND all of my books are saved on their site, so should a book find it’s way in to our bunny’s mouth (yep – we have a bunny), a new book is just a click away.
For me personally, I prefer creating these myself with their Standard Photo Book and use them as our family yearbook each year. Our kids each have their own books from their adoptions and we’ve been able to send update books to their foster families as well. LOVE, LOVE, LOVE Chatbooks.
Blurb
I love Pint Size for the little-littles and Chatbooks for young children, but Blurb is a little more grown up, in my opinion. These are the books that we get out and look at together with our kids, but they don’t have access to them on their own quite yet. We discovered Blurb when we searching for a way to create archival quality books from our vacations. They offer more in terms of book size options, covers, and paper quality and allow you to create a book that is truly custom to you. They even can create ebooks or market and sell a custom book if that is your thing. They still support big, beautiful photos, but are also capable of handling entire pages of print. If I were to one day turn our blog posts into a blog, this is the company I would use.
So many of these companies are able to cross over into other print and product options so try them out and see what you think.
Family Videos
And finally, our favorite way to share stories together… family movie night. We love having prints on our walls and books to look through together, but there is nothing like a story really coming to life through video. Telling your story is so vital for your family’s growth and development and we would argue that sharing it through video stories is the best way to do that.
Our family movies are everything from short films from day trips, to hour long films from adoption journeys, vacations set to music, and highlight clips set in a year end video. We love these movies and watching them together. These aren’t individual clips hanging out on our phones or computers, they are curated stories ready to be savored over and over again.
We’ve found the easiest way to enjoy our family movies is through Vimeo. It’s an easy way to keep them all in one place and makes for an easy share to embed in social media or blog posts. And unlike it’s obnoxious counterpart, Vimeo feels a lot safer to watch with my kiddos. There is no chance of random videos popping up at the end of our story to direct us to things we don’t want our kids to see. As long as we are logged in, we have easy access to all our family videos in one spot.
Capturing your story well matters, but we want to give you the confidence to move away from digital files to archival products and services that you will be able to enjoy together as a family. Preserve your stories well and make sure that you are presenting them in a way that you can really share with your children.
Have a product you’ve discovered that we don’t know about yet? We’d love to hear about it! Leave us a comment below!
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