Lots of pictures!

  It is probably not a surprise that I take A LOT of pictures!  A LOT!  I always have, and I am soooo glad I do.  However, this has required me to do some serious spring cleaning of the digital sort in the past week.  I have no more room for more on my computer and I know I have a lot of pictures that I don't need to keep.  They are just taking up precious space.  In a folder titled, "Fall 2011," I deleted over 1000 pictures which cleared up over 3 GB of space.  I've been working backwards and who knows how much more space I will clear up.  It's a pain, but it also feels really good to get rid of so many pictures that usually are of blurry children.

 

  It has also had me looking at some old videos of our kids and I can't believe how easy it is to forget how they talked or spoke jibberish or were just plain silly.  It is just SO fun to have these videos, and of course it has inspired me to take more videos and more pictures because they won't stay little forever.

 

  I am not so good at organizing videos and have no system, they are just in dated folders and stored on the computer.  However, I have been very good at keeping our pictures organized and since 2011 have made photo books.

  I do a yearly chronicle and last year we needed to do 3 volumes.  We had a lot going on last year, need I explain?!

 

   Each book of this particular size has a maximum of 440 pages and there are countless templates as well as the ability to create your own.

  I love these because you can fit a lot of photos into each book.  Some of these books have between 1300-1500 photos in them.  I mean, you can see I put a lot of basically the same picture which is why it adds up so fast, but each of Calvin's little looks is so different and so priceless I can't not include each one.  I also like that I don't have to print out pictures and put them in big albums.  These are just more visually interesting and I can do captions and date as I go.

 

  I also have made other books that are of events that have a lot of pictures that would take up a lot of room in my yearly chronicle.  Usually these smaller books are trips, but there is a wedding and a birth celebration in there.

 

These are of photo shoots and the one of Mike was for his 30th birthday.

 

  All of these books were done by Blurb which is a program I was introduced to by my uncle who is a photographer, but I know there are other great places to do these.  The important thing is that our memories are available to view, not to mention they are so much fun to look through.  I encourage you to do something with your pictures!

 

  I also like to have some pictures up around the house, but I just don't have enough space for frames for every picture I want to look at regularly.  I crafted up a solution to that and came up with this: 

 

   It's just a large 3' X 2' frame I painted with chicken wire stapled to the back.  Now I can display lots of pictures as well interchange them easily.

  You can use clothes pins to clip each picture to the chicken wire.  Or you can just use clothes pins with magnets (I made mine) because the chicken wire is magnetic!  Even easier!

I just loving seeing all of these silly pictures and cute faces all over the house!

 

I've got to get back to my digital spring cleaning!  Have a great weekend!