Blogging, Logging, and Sharing those Memories

With digital cameras, cameras on your phones, expanded memory cards, laptops that go virtually everywhere, it is easy to come home with hundreds and thousands of pictures, but what next?

What is the best way to store and share all those moments? Not everyone is on Facebook and the album size is limited, but it is so easy and based on your status, friends have already been asking you about your trip.

I take a ton of photos – and with half of our family living a few continents away I have had a chance to evaluate a few tools for sharing photos and here are my favorites.

Shutterfly is a great tool for creating and sharing albums and perhaps the best place to start if you are not keen on social networking tools like Facebook. The interfaces are very user friendly. It is easy to add comments to photos, and to reorder them. You can create one large album with all the photos and then create different albums just selecting some of the photos from the main album. It is also very easy to order prints from Shutterfly. I am now using Picasa (a Google tool) it offers a few more features for online photos (but does not offer the ability to order prints or other photo products). Here is a link that compares sites like Shutterfly and Picasa. With Picasa make sure that you mark your albums private – otherwise they can be publicly searched.

While I love the ease of sharing photos online I am still largely attached to looking at physical photos. I think photo books are the perfect tool to affordably capture all travel memories. You can have photo books created through camera shops and online photo service providers. I have produced many books through www.blurb.com and I am always pleased by the results.

You simply download the software to your PC and then upload photos. There are countless templates, formats and adaptations that can be made. Once images are uploaded on a photoshare site you can do a highlights album on Facebook or simply post the link to your photo site on Facebook.

These memory keepers are surprisingly affordable too. Pricing depends on cover options and length, but a recent book with over a hundred pages (and several hundred photos) cost just over $50 US I couldn’t have printed all the pictures for that. I’d also suggest that once you do the work of putting the book together, print some extras (you can quickly just change a title or dedicate page and give the children each their own copy).

Until next time
Melanie Taljaard