Photo album tips
The freedom and accessibility of digital photography mean many of us have ended up with unwieldy archives, stored away in the cloud and rarely explored. Occasionally we may think back to the days of photo prints and family albums and wish we’d get round to printing our photos. But with such vast material to pick from, where do you even start? I have a few tips to help.
1. Pick a theme
Be very specific about what your album will be about. ‘Photos of the children’ may feel like an impossible job, try limiting it to, for example, every first day of the month, or bicycle rides, or photos with the colour red. It can be as meaningful or arbitrarily playful as you want it to be: the key is to find a way to browse and select without getting overwhelmed.
2. Keep it small
Challenge yourself to keep it to a set number of photographs, whether it’s three, ten or twenty, and stop browsing when you’ve reached that number. Alternatively, try picking just one photo for each month of a set year, or limit yourself to one location that you only visit occasionally.
3. Follow your heart
The archive will still be there to go back to later, so look through the photos that you want to look at, and avoid any that may feel sad or painful at the moment. Keep it light and follow your fancy as you’re browsing, picking a new theme if it comes up, and ignoring any rules.
4. Be creative
The joy of having all our photos archived digitally is that we can endlessly create new albums from them. Think of it as a museum collection in storage, from which you pick items for an exhibition. So be creative and experiment: with themes, selections, sizes, edits, paper… Explore and see what you create.
For more tips and guidance to create and bind a memory book full of your images and words, see my Make a memory book online workshop.
You may also like my concertina albums, available to buy from my shop.
