As my parents began to pack up my childhood home it didn’t take long for my mom to call and tell me to get down there and claim what I wanted.

I lived several hours away but the next weekend I was in the car.  Too many memories were in this house. Those memories risked seeing only the bottom of a dumpster if I didn’t save them.

 

One weekend turned into several. I found myself in the car again traveling I-35 to finish going through all my prized possessions from 3rd grade.  Old ballet shoes, prom dresses, awards but the place I got lost was the Christmas closet.

 

The Christmas closet was stacked high with garland, lights and ornaments but on the bottom shelves were clear plastic Container Store tubs.  Inside those tubs were shoeboxes with each of my siblings names on them and then several unmarked.

 

They were full of 4×6 photos and true blackmail if you want to get real.

 

These photos forced me to sit, cross-legged, on the floor and laugh, cry, even holler down the stairs and ask my mom, “when did you make us all wear blue striped shirts with matching belt pouches?  Looks like we’re in a desert of some sort” and to hear her shout back the answer, “road trip to Grand Canyon, your sister was in kinder”. I swear, that lady has a steal trap mind!

 

I pulled the photos of birthdays and graduations, of births and family vacays and I slid them into an album I had bought at Hobby Lobby.  My kids were going to LOVE looking at these one day!

 

We love to look at photos and strike up conversations based on memories.  Thanks to my mom taking her roll of film to Walgreens and then sliding photos into a shoebox I have something to remember.

 

But as I flipped through my own photos in that shoebox I began to get a little anxious.  I didn’t have kids yet but one day I would. And all my photos, all my memories are sitting on a glowing screen in my back pocket.  Would that be where there’s would rest too? Where would their shoebox be? In the “cloud”?

 

Make sure you read to the bottom of this post. I’ve created a free resource to quickly and easily get your phone pics out of digital space!

 

This was a turning point for me.  As a professional photographer for a decade I knew what people did with my creative and beautiful “art work” they let it sit on their computers.  Weddings never printed, family milestones in digital space. I knew this.

 

And I was not going to let it happen to me.

 

I went home and made our first “family album”.  Just me and my hubby and it was of our wedding a year ago.  I printed that baby up and it sits on our coffee table to this day.  

 

But I didn’t stop there.  With our wedding album sitting on the table I realized that more people would flip through it and ask questions, start a conversation that NEVER would have if I left those photos on the CD buried in our guest room closet (please don’t get scratched!)

 

When January hit I forced myself to sit down and sift through my phone from the past year.  It was grueling and I squinted a lot. But I finally had a folder on my desktop with about 728 photos, the best of the best.

 

I arranged them in an album (over several days) and hit order.  It may not seem like much but when you finish a project like, a whole year of memories, trips, adventures, milestones and everyday life you can’t help but plunk down on the couch and slowly turn the pages while smiling.

 

Now with kids of my own I’ve developed a more time efficient method to my process of getting my pics off my phone and into my hands (no glowing screen included).

 

It starts with knowing how to take a great phone pic in the first place so you have the memory captured just the way you want.

 

Next, there’s a simple process for getting those pretty little pics off your phone and into an album.

 

I walk you through this whole system with my Phoneography Course.  Designed to fill a shoebox for your kids. To give them the pleasure of memories and to have something to show for their lives in 20 years.

 

Years down the road when it’s time for the kids to graduate and you need to find some blackmail for their slideshow, will you really be able to swipe back to today?  No, you’ll walk to the living room coffee table and pick up the 2019 album you print tomorrow.