Ah, the miraculous printed family photograph, a lost art in the digital age. Or maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration and maybe we’re not quite near the point of extinction, but when was the last time you printed photos and really put the time into building a photo album? A scrap book? Documented your kid’s year at school?

With friends and family visiting, something about crowding around the computer to view a photo album lacks its charm (and comfort). And sure, slide shows on the television screen are nice, but something about printed photos – though it may be old school – creates actual keepsakes you can hold… physical evidence of travels, life cycle events, etc. I guess at some point we’ll be inheriting a disc on key of a person’s life rather than a stack of photo albums.

So instead of spending endless hours in front of the computer building the best photo slide show the world has ever seen or simply clicking through a Flickr account to show your friends, try heading back to the basics. Grab a friend, a kid, or maybe a sibling and take those thousands of digital photos and not only print the best of the best among them, but incorporate the pictures into scrapbooks, special photo albums, make a photo collage, etc. I’ll never forget the framed poster-sized photo collage I got for my 13th birthday packed with hundreds of cut out photos.

Better yet, think ahead and save ticket stubs, post cards, brochures and keepsakes from your travels or family events that can then be pasted into a scrap book along with your photos.

An album, a little creativity, a pair of scissors and a rainy Sunday is all you need.

Plenty of resources available here to get you started:
scrapjazz.com
scrapbook.com
the-scrapbook-store.com

Logging off now.