Happy World Backup Day!

A few years ago, I spent a morning consoling a friend as she realized the digital photos from the first 7 years of her kid’s lives had vanished.  The files were lost in a computer transfer, and after hours on the phone with Apple experts, it was not looking promising. Her attempts to locate the images from the online photo service she used 10 years ago yielded corrupted files…

This experience weighed heavy on my heart and is always in the back of my mind when I remind people about the importance of having a solid backup strategy in place.

The online backup service I have used for years and always recommend to friends: Backblaze.  Two other great options: Amazon Photos and DropBox.

If backing up your photos with a secure offsite solution has been on your to-do list for too long, today is the day to make it happen!

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As I tucked my latest travel photo book up onto the shelf last week, I found myself thinking about a Peloton class I had taken earlier in the day. The instructor was musing about the difference between discipline and motivation.

His point was that you are not going to feel motivated to workout every day, but discipline keeps you showing up. Same can be said of other personal projects we take on and desire to finish.

Many of us are motivated to get our photos off our laptop and phone and put them out into the world so our families can have these travel memories to enjoy together. But it is the discipline of creating a plan, breaking the project into small bite-size tasks, setting deadlines etc., that gets these books up on your shelf.

“Motivation gets you going, but discipline keeps you growing.“

So stop waiting for motivation to start the book you’ve been wanting to design – make a plan and attack it with the focus and discipline you demonstrate in other areas of your life!

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It’s been a minute (or 2 years) since I’ve been able to add to this travel collection, but I’m back with a new Travel Series photo book to share!

When the window for international travel cracked open just a smidgen last summer, our family was quick to jump through it…

After 12+ months of sheltering-in-place, we were all so grateful to escape the routines of home and spend time together exploring a beautiful new corner of this world.

I’ll stop writing now and share a little glimpse into the magic of Iceland with the hope of inspiring you to #printyourphotos…

Add it to your travel bucket list, this little Nordic island does not disappoint!

For lots of tips and tricks on designing travel photo books, check out my other books from this series and get started documenting your travel adventures, whether they are near or far, today. 

Patagonia, Sweden & Norway, Switzerland, Costa Rica, Kenya, Japan

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Feeling “behind” in your memory keeping efforts?

Overwhelmed by the volume of photos you have trapped on your phone and various other places?

What if I shared one project that could relieve you of your guilt and provide a valuable keepsake for your kid(s)?

Keep reading folks…

This project has been percolating in my mind for years and I’m so happy to have finally turned my ideas into reality.

What is this magical book that will both make you feel better and your kid feel special and loved?

Essentially, it is a love letter to your child (or insert the special person of your choice) filled with personal stories and highlight images from their life. I’ve been writing letters to my kids on their birthdays for the last 18 years. Maybe you have journal notes. Or maybe you have nothing but could write a few sentences, guided by your photos, about your kid for each year of their life. Or maybe you just let the images tell the story.

The idea is to create highlight reel of the first 18 years of life, no big deal , let’s break it down…

DESIGN STRATEGY

There are so many different design directions you could take this, but here is the formula I followed to create my book that I gave to my daughter when she graduated from high school last year:

Layout 1 | Year/Age + Highlight Photo

Layout 2 + 3 | Birthday letter + a favorite image with me and the birthday girl from that year. Some letters extended to a 3rd page and I added a large image on page 4.

Layout 4 | Full bleed photo + 9 grid of images with dates beneath

Repeat 18x. Yes, this was tedious. I took my time and worked on it, bit by bit, for about 6 months. Each year looked something like this…

BONUS POINTS | Drop in a few videos via qr code to add a bit of life to the stories and images! “

A Word About…

CHOOSING PHOTOS

In order to avoid the analysis paralysis that can result from trying to choose your favorite photos, I let feelings be my guide. I wanted the book to tell the story of family connection, love, belonging and happiness. Photos that spoke to those feelings made the cut.

SELECTING A BOOK VENDOR

I knew I wanted this book to be high quality. As much as I would have loved to select a layflat album with a beautiful embossed cover, I also needed a decent number of pages and 100 pages was just not going to be enough. I selected a MILK Premium Photo Book Album that struck the perfect balance of premium quality and page quantity.

With a 160 page maximum I did the math: 160 pages/18 years = 8.8 pages/year.

So 4 layouts/year with a few extra pages of buffer for intro/outro pages. This calculation is what allowed me to arrive at the design formula detailed above.

Still not sure how to start?

IDENTIFY YOUR REASON WHY

I had three goals for this project:

GOAL #1 | Share stories and my love via my annual birthday letter

GOAL #2 | Capture the feelings of her childhood

GOAL #3 | Create one keepsake she could take to her first apartment after college

Rather than include every memory, I wanted her to feel what her childhood was like from a few representative photos. And rather than burden her with 18 photo albums from her very well-documented life, I wanted her to have a reasonable tangible memory book to remind her of the first chapter of family life. Being clear about these three goals helped guide both my photo selections and book vendor.

For everyone feeling behind in their memory keeping, making one book like this for each kid at graduation could really check the box. Watching my daughter read through every letter and laugh at old photos was one of my favorite moments of the year!

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One of the cool things about a digital photo frame is the ability to create playlists for special occasions. While I have grand plans to set up albums for each family member to celebrate them on their birthdays, one playlist  I’ve actually executed on is a “Holiday Favorites” album.

It includes my 753 all-time favorite Christmas images. And boy did it fill me up last year. Even better, I created customized versions for the grandparents so they could enjoy the holidays with us as best we were able to last year. Looking back on our favorite traditions and time spent together as a family definitely helped fill the void that was Christmas 2020.

I’ve owned and managed a number of digital frames over the years (Ceiva, Pixstar, Loop) and this Nixplay product is one of the best. Perfect holiday gift idea for yourself or a loved one!

The post How My Digital Frame Saved Christmas 2020 appeared first on Suzanne O'Brien Studio.

How I digitized 33 photo albums and 12 photo boxes during lockdown…

Some people mastered the art of baking sourdough bread, others started gardens. I organized my photos. And I don’t think I’m alone, so many things about this past year made us consider what matters most. For those of you that still have boxes of photos you’d love to make some sense of, this post is for you!

This project was on my “When the Kids Are Off To College” list. Then, all of sudden, it moved to my “When You Don’t Leave the House for 100+ Days List.” Last year, I methodically tackled the project of digitizing all of my (and my husband’s!) childhood photos. Want to come along on the journey?!

This process will look different for everyone given the current state of your photos. My hope is that by sharing the details about my specific project and process, it might give you some ideas for how to tackle your own situation! 

How it Started…

My printed photos started out in two locations: shoeboxes and these albums shown above. My goal was to eliminate the shoeboxes, digitize the best photos, and freshen up the album pages. So let’s get started…

1. SAY GOODBYE TO MAGNETIC PAGES | The first big reason I wanted to take on this project was these yellowing magnetic photo album pages. Yuck. I peeled out the photos, ready to give them a new home in archival quality pages. If your photos are particularly stuck, check out some of the clever solutions found here.

2. PAIR WITH DUPLICATES & NEGATIVES | The second reason I was happy to jump into this activity was my desire to remove this photo tower from my office. I hadn’t looked in these boxes in years, time for them to go!

As I pulled the photos from their magnetic pages, I paired them with their parent envelope full of duplicate, similar photos and negatives.

3. SCAN OR TOSS |  Next, I scanned the photos I wanted to preserve and tossed the rest in a pile on the ground. My best advice for this scary part? Just start. I had thought about how I wanted to do this forever because I was hung up about what to do with the extra photos and negatives. I had kept them neatly organized for so long, it seemed like a loss to get rid of them. But once I started working through them, I realized I would be much more likely to quickly look up a digital file and reorder a print vs. scrounging through old envelopes for ancient negatives. Seriously, just start.

4. SAVE ONLY THE BEST | I then put only the best of the best back into archival safe album pages. With the benefit of perspective on my side, I was able to cut down the number of photos I put back in these albums. I really didn’t need 2 full layouts (4 pages) to tell the story of a college spring break trip. 1 layout (2 pages) with the best photos was plenty.

5. LABEL | I’m a big fan of adding simple labels to describe photos when possible. Fortunately, my original albums had some labels, and I was also diligent about writing names/dates/places on the back of my photos, so this was pretty easy for me to create labels to make my albums easier to understand.

6. ORGANIZE DIGITAL FILES | This was the fun part for me. I got busy in Adobe Lightroom star rating and adding keywords to my new digital files so they would be easy to search in the future.

7. TOSS EXTRAS, DUPLICATES AND NEGATIVES | I know this seems scary/hard/impossible, choose your adjective. But I’m telling you, once I had the images digitized and backed up, I was able to loosen my grip on these things. I had not touched that photo tower in five years since moving into our new house (and even longer before that). Those boxes had photos and negatives starting from 1981! Like I said, once I opened those envelopes, the thought of searching through a negative strip to reprint an image just seemed silly compared to quickly locating an image in Lightroom and reprinting as needed.

8. ENTERTAIN YOURSELF | Good podcasts and/or audiobooks are critical companions during the most tedious parts of this process!

FINAL THOUGHTS

If I didn’t already own these albums full of all of my photos since 5th grade (it’s been a lifelong passion folks), I would have just digitized the printed photos and created a digital photo book with these images. Much smaller footprint. 

Despite all of the worries and uncertainty of 2020, I now sleep just a little bit better knowing that if something were to happen to these albums sitting pretty in our family room, the important content held inside is safe and backed up.

Hopefully sharing my workflow got your wheels spinning about how you might make some headway with your own printed photos. Reduce the physical photo clutter and your anxiety about your printed photos not being backed up. Digitize the keepers. Increase your ability to easily access and enjoy your memories!

Project Start Date: April 27, 2020

Project Completion Date:  October 15, 2020  (6 months)

Supply List

Albums + Pages

Paper trimmer

Adhesive

Scanner

Adobe Lightroom

Good podcasts and/or audiobooks

The post Pandemic Project: Organizing Printed Photos appeared first on Suzanne O'Brien Studio.

Graduation is just around the corner in our house! As I was brainstorming with other moms creative ideas to make our high school seniors feel special in this most difficult year, I was reminded of this party I organized four years ago for her middle school graduation. Small and personal celebrations are my favorite and this one was no exception.

If you are looking for an easy way to add some personalization to a party for your graduate, read on, because pen and paper is all that is required to create something meaningful that will stand the test of time for your special student…

Since this party was celebrating the graduates of an international middle school, I chose a global travel theme. I truly believe the world awaits these awesome kids…

Once again, I failed to get a photo of the finished fully styled table, a party blogger I am not, but you get the general idea. Globes, maps + photos of the grads. I wanted to mark their growth so I stopped by school and took quick portraits of the kids and mounted them on canvas frames from Michaels. I then paired the 8th grade photos with pictures of each kid from their preschool days – the kids and parents alike had a good time looking back at these sweet mementos.

Now, getting to the original point of this post. As soon as the kids arrived at the party (this was easy as they all came together straight from school on the last day) I asked them to grab the stack of cards by their bag and write one note to each of their sectionmates. Doable with 10 kids!

Once they were done, each kid walked along the table and dropped a note in everyone’s individual envelope. I had also included a fun class photo in the glassine bags. And since our kids have mostly all been in school together as a small class for 10 years, when the parents arrived later in the night, I asked them to kindly add their voices as well.

All sorts of good stuff followed this activity, including swimming and games, tacos, a highlights video invoking laughter and tears and, of course, much cake.

While the kids can’t take home swimming, tacos and cake at the end of the night, they can hang on to these special notes. Smaller than a yearbook, a little envelope of goodness they can tuck in their desk and happen upon from time to time, reminding them of this very special time in their lives.

In fact, my daughter still has her bag filled with these kind words of love, support and encouragement hanging on her bulletin board. Many of the other pictures and mementos have changed and been updated over the past four years, but that little glassine envelope has been a constant. Words matter.

Sources:

Project Life 3×4 lined index cards

Glassine bags

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Below are 5 books I created to document trips throughout the United States. Each of these destinations offers plenty of space to get outside and enjoy a change of scenery. Click through on the titles to see more!

1. Yosemite

Fall colors and surprise snowstorms are captured in this softcover photo book…

2. Alaska

No shortage of space here, this might be the perfect time to visit this stunning state. Fun fact: I got engaged in Alaska!

3. Utah

So many incredible ways to spend a week in Utah – this book tells the story of touring Arches, Moab and Capitol Reef…

4. Maui

Hawaii seems to be a popular spot right now for folks looking to get away…

5. Pacific Northwest

A visit to Seattle and the San Juan Islands told simply through photos from the breathtaking scenery in this region…

Where will you find yourself this spring break? Allow these visual journals to inspire you to consider a new domestic vacation spot this year. Or perhaps, now is the time to document your own past trips as you dream about future ones!

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What to do when you can’t make your 18th annual trip to see the grandparents in Palm Springs? You send them 329 postcards from years past via their digital photo frame!

As my Nixplay digital frame cycles through the playlist I created that includes images from 2003 – 2020, it makes me hopeful for our return to the desert next March! And I know my parents will love this little surprise awaiting them on their frame when they return home from California.

If you’re struggling to get your images out of your phone or computer, a frame like this could be a great starting point for bringing some memories into your home!

p.s. check out this short time lapse video of my frame in action!

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One of the biggest challenges my clients and friends share with me is that they lack an organized photo system. They are overwhelmed. Drowning.  Buried. Scattered. Sound familiar?

They want to be able to find the specific photo they want, when they want it. That doesn’t seem like too much to ask, does it?  If one of your biggest desires is to create a photo organization system, keep reading, my friend, while I share a story about the time a snowstorm gave me the gift of time to do just that..

This story is on my mind because I just celebrated my 5th anniversary of finally feeling on top of my photos. It was February 2017, ski week here in California. Lake Tahoe was already enjoying an epic winter and that week delivered the mother of all storms. The ski resorts were mostly closed as they dug out from the non-stop storms, our road was not plowed and internet was spotty.

If there was ever a moment to roll up my sleeves and get my digital photo act together, this was it! Does this scenario of being isolated in your home sound familiar to anyone?

These photos of our home seem fairly symbolic of how I was feeling about my photos – a bit buried! So here are the 5 steps I recommend to take you from feeling buried to breathing easier…

1 | Gather Photos In One Centralized Place

For most folks, I recommend making their photo home an external hard drive (EHD) as our photo collections can easily exceed the space we have on our computers. I’m currently using this 4TB EHD. Of course, this gathering process will look different for everyone. For me, it involved collecting my digital photos from Apple’s Aperture program, double checking old iPhoto libraries, and pulling photos and videos from another older EHD. You might have photos on memory cards, old CDs, Facebook, or your phone to name a few typical storage spots. This is the essence of why we can feel so overwhelmed and scattered! But bringing all of your images into this one space will help so much.

Did I know how to do all of these tasks? Nope, but I do know how to do a Google search and in the words of Marie Forleo, “everything is figureoutable”! I will say my favorite ways to get a lot of photos off of your phone are the DropBox or Amazon Photos apps. They allow you to sync your camera roll and then you can access these files online from your computer.

2 | Ignore the Photo Clutter

I cannot emphasize this step enough. You will be tempted to want to clean out all of the “bad” photos (blurry images, screenshots etc.) but trust me, resist the urge. That project will always be there for you to tackle over time. For now, our goal is to get your photos organized in one place and backed up, keep moving forward! Remember the expression “can’t see the forest for the trees”? Yep, stay focused on the big picture and resist the urge to get bogged down in the little details right now.

3 | Remove Duplicates

Once you have all your photos happily together in one place, you may need to eliminate duplicate images. Check out this slick software, Photo Sweeper, that makes it easy to identify and delete duplicate and similar photos.

4 | Organize Folders

My preferred folder structure is simple folders by year and month (see below). For special events or trips with lots of photos, I will create another folder for that. I like separating out my videos from photos, so create a “13 Video” folder for those. If you have a lot of photos and videos to organize into Year/Month folders, I highly recommend recruiting Silent Sifter software to help with this process.

4.5 | Utilize Photo Management Software (optional)

This was the point where I pulled my photos into Adobe Lightroom, a program I was already familiar with and knew I wanted to make my primary software for organizing and editing my photos. There is a learning curve with using this software though, so if you are not ready to invest the time or money right now in this program, I highly recommend Adobe Bridge because it is free and does a great job organizing photos. But this step is definitely not required before taking the final step. In fact, if I weren’t sharing my story with you, I would skip this step and urge you to move on to…

5 | Enable Auto Backup

Backblaze, DropBox and Amazon Photos are my recommended backup options. 

Of course an entire blog post could be dedicated to each step above, but I wanted to keep this post as simple as possible and show you a clear path to conquering the photo overwhelm. Are you feeling as optimistic and hopeful as this pup after that storm?

I truly believe if you stay laser focused on getting those photos organized in one place and backed up, you will sleep better at night. And once you have all of your photos under your control, in one location, the real fun begins! Stay tuned for additional photo organization inspiration and join me on Instagram to continue the conversation…

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