Making the Most of Your Family's Vacation Photos

20 Aug Making the Most of Your Family's Vacation Photos

Making the most of the boatload of family vacation photos:
Now that every member of your family has incredible picture-taking power at their fingertips, your vacation images are likely spread out across multiple devices and have been liked, pinned, tweeted and hashtagged across a half dozen social media accounts.
But with just a little bit of time and thought, there’s so much more you can do with these pictures as you’re taking them and after you get home.



Start with the end in mind.
Think about how you would like to “live” with your memories. So many options… An album, framed prints, a wall of gallery-wrapped canvas, a slideshow set to music. You can in fact do all of these with photos you took with your phone as well as your camera.



But as you are in the moment, living and documenting, here’s a tip for the moms. Make sure you include yourself in the moment, historically as well as literally. You may end up behind the camera most of the time. But whatever it takes, make sure that you all appear together and individually coupled off at least a few times in your printed memories.


So what’s the best way to do that? Learn the art of the “selfie” or the “ussie” by mastering the self-timer and the hand extend. You could stalk that random person who looks friendly and appears that they know what they’re doing, or better yet, learn and get creative with the self-timer. Remember that the self-time is your friend — as are mirrors, plate glass windows, and water with reflection. At the end of the day, no one is concerned more about your family pictures more than you, so take control of it.



Here’s the one that the nice well-intentioned stranger offered to take.

Here’s the self-timer, a beach chair, and a creatively positioned book.


How do you want to remember this moment?
Round up all the images to one central location.
Once you get home, it’s all about the gathering of the images and what to do with them.
First, figure out where all the pictures currently “live.” Then create a single folder on your computer and start dumping all the vacation pictures in it. Most importantly make sure you create at least one redundant copy of the folder, in a different location!!

Hashtagging in advance can make gathering much easier. A tip: while you’re on vacation, create a family hashtag and have all your people use it when they are sharing images socially. Ours is #harrisagogo, and it makes it really easy to go back and search for images. If you didn’t use one at the time, no problem – you can always go back to Instagram, Facebook, etc. and add a comment with your new family hashtag later.



The idea is to figure out all the great images your family captured that you may not even know about yet!
So what’s really the ‘best’ thing to do with your pictures?
The right answer is that it doesn’t matter as long as you get them off your devices, and actually do something with them.
You may not yet feel all nostalgic about what happened last week, but I promise you that in 10 years, 5 years, and probably even next year you will — after your kids have changed and so much water has continued to flow under life’s bridge.
You will be so ever grateful that you invested a couple hours to get the digital pictures off the family iPhones and cameras and on to the walls and family coffee table in priceless tangible keepsakes that you will cherish for years to come.