February 1, 2021

A Beginner’s Guide to Documenting Daily Life: Printing and Organizing Photos

I believe with my whole heart that a photo isn’t complete until it’s printed, either on paper or in a book, as something you can hold in your hands. These might be strong words coming from a woman with exactly 53,882 photos on my camera roll, but not every photo is print-worthy . . . see exhibit A of my pajama selfie at the bottom. (If you’re wondering why I have so many, I decided I’d rather pay for storage and keep them than have to go through all of them. I know, it’s a problem).

Photographs are made to be printed, kept, and passed down as treasures. And you cannot pass down a digital image to your grandchildren. The overwhelming pressure to print and organize images is only complicated by the sheer volume of photos we have in our personal collections, thanks to the convenience of digital photos. I remember reading “Bending the Frame,” by Fred Ritchen and being truly amazed when he said that “there are as many photographs produced every two minutes today as were made in the entire nineteenth century.”

With that many photos, it can feel like a hopeless task to stay organized, and as a naturally disorganized person, I’ve had to create a system that I find works for me. On my phone, once I edit images in my Lightroom app, I export them to the camera roll. From there, I put my favorites in an album, usually with the title of the year or season. Having them in one place makes it a lot easier to order prints through apps right on your smartphone. At the end of 2020, I made a book of my favorite phone images in a soft book from Artifact Uprising (yes, with a photo of lost dentures in the grocery store parking lot, which seemed to represent a lot of what 2020 felt like).

Images from my camera, edited on my computer, are an entirely different beast. I order prints for my personal collection about 2-3 times a year. When I’m done with edits, I export images to folders based on dates, organized by month and year. When I’m ready, I cull through all the edits and select favorites for prints and export them to a folder where I can keep them all together. At the end of the year, I go back into those folders of my top selections and use those to make a family “yearbook” as I’ve done since 2008 (these two more recent years were made with Artifact Uprising as well).

In preparation for our move this past summer, I got serious about organizing my photos. The more recent photos were already organized, but I had boxes and boxes of photos from high school, with doubles of people I don’t remember, 35mm negatives, and just some really crappy images. I mean, if you see what’s on my 53,000 photo camera roll, can you imagine the garbage I printed from a disposable camera in 1996? It took a long time to go through everything, but I finally sorted through all my images, until I got them into a system that looks like this:

You can find these boxes for prints on Amazon, linked here.

Another way of storing prints is with wooden boxes like these ones. After a family trip, I ordered prints and boxes to hold them and gave them to my kids as a keepsake (they make great gifts and you can find them at most of the labs that make prints).

Things to keep in mind along the way for printing and album making: First, the images don’t have to be perfect. They can be blurry or chopping a hand off at the corner of the frame or a messy composition. In the beginning of this series, I talked about how to make images better through composition. BUT, when it comes to your personal collection, there is only one rule: it has to mean something to you. That’s the only thing that matters. Second, the prints are for your personal collection. Just like not everything needs to be shared publicly, prints have the ability to remain private. Personally, I don’t want to share nude images of my children publicly, but I do have prints of them running around nude when they were smaller. Now that I have teens, on occasion I will make an image of one of my children with the promise that I won’t share that image publicly, but with their permission, I will print those images or insert them into our family albums.

For my 40th birthday in September, my mother made me this beautiful book, spending countless hours scanning old photos so she could give me a piece of the memories we shared from my childhood. It’s the most meaningful gift I’ve ever been given. It doesn’t matter that the prints might be a little grainy or faded from the last 40 years or that the cameras belonging to average families of the 1980’s were limited in their capabilities. The images are snapshots, not taken by a professional, but they represent real moments in my life, people whom I love (and some who are no longer here), and an imperfect family I wouldn’t trade for the world.