Going back to print photos

I love spending time at my Mum’s house going through our old family photo albums, I’m conscious this is something we don’t have for my daughter. Despite having 1000s more photos due to the convenience of camera phones, they’re all in the cloud and rarely take time to look at them, Apps occasionally pop up ‘memory’ photos and I realise I’d have a massive backlog to print off photos of her / our mementos.

is there an easy way to surmount this legacy vacuum?

Something I’m guilty of not doing myself, but….

Take time to catalogue your photos – and put the special ones in a dedicated folder – and maybe print some of the special ones.

Would be my advice

My kids loved looking at photos when they visit their gran so I started to print our pictures a few years ago, not too many, just the holidays/birthday/Christmas times and a few others through the years mixed in. They still enjoy dipping into them now and they are in their late teens!
I just use the snapfish app, the quality isn’t the best but you get 50 free every month (just pay P+P) so I do this a few times each year and have built up about 3 albums of memories now which is nice. I have also downloaded them all to a hard drive, I empty the phone once a year onto it as I don’t use the cloud. If the house goes up in flames I have said they need to get themselves out as I am grabbing the pictures/hard drive as the insurance will replace everything else but not the memories.

I have a couple of Google Home Hubs in the house. These pop up photos from Albums I’ve created in Google Photos (so, a little bit of effort) and also random photos from the past 12 months. They’re great as a wee reminder to go look out some other photos too. I also have stacks of older printed photos and thousands of slide/transparencies which I never look at. I’ve scanned a few hundred so at least they are easy to find. Maybe a bit of a winter project to get more scanned.

PS..I meant to add, the first couple of times I printed the pictures I thought I would bulk print, something like 500 for £50 as there was a deal, and just downloaded them in bulk to save time without paying attention. When I got them quite a lot had been cropped so we’re missing heads etc. apparently the dimensions of phone pictures is different from print dimensions which can often result in them being cropped so you often have to review/edit each picture to avoid this, hence I only do smaller quantities now as I lose the will to live if I do more than about 50. If you are printing hundreds then I find CEWE/Boots online are better quality than snap fish and also better value for big orders usually, but if you are printing smaller quantities and not as fussed about paper quality then the free snapfish ones are fine.

Photo books are a good option.

You can do them for specific events like a holiday, or just do an annual photo summary.

They can take a while to layout nicely, although I think a lot of the websites now have an auto layout function.

I generally use Photo box.

I created some of these for my daughter’s early years as I figure she won’t remember them but might like to look back at what we used to get up to. She digs them out every few months and enjoys having a look through them.

If you get a few big prints at Snapmad you can get 25 free prints. I get a few A4 prints and 25 “free” which go on the wall within a frame I made with mini clothes pegs. When I get the next order the prints are put in an album. So much better than 25k photos in Google.