What Do You Do With All Those Pictures On Your Phone?

Besides moving them into the cloud to free up storage.

If you’re like me, you take a ton of (mostly crappy) pictures with your iPhone.

I am terrible at organizing them, though, so when I go to show you a picture of my new couch, I make you stand there for years while I scroll through all my boring Thanksgiving shots, looking for that particular shot of my couch.

Remember the days of photo albums like these?

And does anybody remember mailing film away to be processed?

When my fat envelope of processed photos would arrive in the mailbox from Mystic Color Lab, it was like Christmas. I’d tear into it, mourn the duds, then spend hours sorting and sliding those 4x6s into individual glassine pockets, arranging and re-arranging to get the order just right. 

Countless rainy days were spent belly-flopped on my bed, flipping through those pages, reliving all the times, and re-feeling all the feels.

Digital photos are great, and I don’t ever want to go back to the old days of film and processing, but a physical picture album that you can hold on your lap and read like a storybook? Man, that has to be one of life’s underrated pleasures.

One thing I love and appreciate so much about G is that every year for Christmas, she creates a photo book on Shutterfly from our digital pictures.

Starting in November, she starts going through our phones, copying all our shots, and then spends hours, days, and weeks curating a highlight reel of our past year.

She’s been doing this for years. Here’s the stack:

We call ourselves “The Funz.” 

We have our Bali book, our India book, our family trip to Yosemite, and even a book from her parent’s fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration, in addition to all the regular years. 

The latest ones: The Funz 2020 and The Funz 2021, just turned up the other night. She’s been cleaning and found them at the bottom of some rubble in her room.  

These were the pandemic years, and I missed them when they didn’t show up at Christmas but never said anything because, well, they were the pandemic years.

The Funz 2020

The Funz 2021:

Here are some pages from them.

Zoom yoga and social distancing:

A day trip to Kinzua Bridge:

An epic snowfall:

A family trip to Rehoboth:

If you kinda love this idea but the thought of curating a whole year’s worth of pictures seems daunting, think smaller.

A little book of shots of the kids, or grandkids could make a great Mother’s Day gift. 

If you want to get artsy, you could even do a theme book, like “Spring” or “Things I Love.”

We have always used Shutterfly, but there are other companies out there like Snapfish and Mixbook that make it super easy to take a selection of your photos and make a book out of them. 

I have had people gift me with photo books of pictures they took of the yoga studio, and I have to tell you, I treasure these little books! 

All of these book services have templates, so you pick one and drag your photos into place and then caption them– my favorite part. 

So the next time you find yourself scrolling through your pictures, star a few and think about making a little book out of some. I think you’ll like it.