About two years ago, my parents sold my childhood home after living in it for over 35 years. On one of my trips home before we put it on the market, I found boxes filled with thousands and THOUSANDS of printed photos that my parents had so diligently printed out in the old days of film. I took them all home with me and have been slowly working through them to organize and catalog them. You could say my dad and I are the family historians. While organizing photos into boxes seems easy, each time I picked up a stack, I would slowly flip through our family trip to Europe, my school play, or my siblings’ birthday, or whatever major milestone we had in our family of 6. Reminiscing about what life was like back then, and where we are today is a rabbit hole that I’ve spent HOURS in.
Today, technology is a blessing and a curse. We all find ourselves taking more pictures with our phones, it gets uploaded to the cloud and often times will stay there unless we intentionally print it out. It’s not accessible to our family members or friends to enjoy it. And I had a huge moment this past year when my husband and I celebrated our 10 year wedding anniversary in August. We flipped through our wedding album with our boys and it was a surreal moment. Having them ask questions about our day, having them point out their grandparents, aunts, uncles, and us telling them sidebar stories of that day was truly a moment I couldn’t have wrapped my brain around right after I got married. Trust me! Those images lived on a hard drive for YEARS until I made an album of them. But seeing their little fingers grace each page, point to people, and see the pictures from the first day of the legacy we started for our family is monumental.
Below are three tips to build your legacy for future generations:
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Print Your Legacy
Print it all; your engagement session, your wedding, your family sessions. Make it tangible not just for you to hold and touch and see, but for your family, your extended family, and anyone else that can see it without knowing what your cloud password is. Make it accessible for future generations to hop back and see easily. Or for older generations who just can’t seem to remember their email address or password even if you wrote it down and taped it to their computer.
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Items to Create
You can get prints for your images, or albums made but I’ve seen so many other great uses as well! Here are a few ideas:
Engagement Photos: Wedding Save the Dates Cards, wedding guestbook, your favorite engagement photo framed and matted for all your guests to sign, Printed and framed to decorate throughout your wedding shower.
Wedding Photos: Prints to be gifted to your family as gifts, a wedding album or coffee table book, an album to gift to your parents, prints framed to place on your wall by itself or made into a gallery wall, a thank you card to all your guests
Family Photos (Maternity, Newborn, Family Sessions): Update your photos around your home, holiday cards, birth announcements, Baby books, family calendars, coffee table.
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Use a Quality Printer
You’ve invested a pretty penny on your images. Don’t send them off to get printed at the pharmacy or an online company like Shutterfly. Your high quality images printed on a low quality printer will simply not look quite the way you’d like it to. Simply put, it won’t do your photos justice. I’d recommend printing through the print labs in your online gallery. I’ve vetted out the printers and they are up to the quality you can expect from me.
And lastly, because technology still runs our world, share your photos across your social media platforms and tag all your vendors. People want to know who you used, what you wore, etc to pull your most perfect day/shoot together!
