By KATHERINE SNOW SMITH
Published October 17, 2004
When Hurricane Ivan was bearing down on us, my friend Dana Scott headed to Orlando with her most valuable things - her kids, her husband and her photos. Some of the pictures were organized into albums but most were in boxes.
Still, she's way ahead of many parents because she has a plan for organizing her photos and is well on the way to moving those loose pictures into books. Mention photos to most people and they groan or roll their eyes thinking of all the boxes, envelopes and drawers full of pictures that spend more time in limbo than in neatly organized albums for family and friends to peruse.
The more you have the more daunting it is.
And now with the popularity of scrapbooking and so many options for taking, storing and printing digital photos, the thought of sitting down and organizing your favorite photos is even more overwhelming. That's why so many parents just put it off.
I like Scott's photo system. Instead of putting photos in chronological order she groups them in books based on events. She has a Christmas album, Thanksgiving album, vacation album, birthday albums and so on.
"You take so many photos and it gets so overwhelming you don't do anything with them. But after Christmas you can handle just putting your Christmas photos in a (Christmas) book," she said.
I really like the fact that you don't have to thumb through five albums at a time to see how your child changed from year to year.
"In the same book you're seeing your children at 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and on up. You can really see them change and have a fun comparison in one book," said Scott, who has a 10-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son.
Another smart move - she uses three-ring binders so she can add pages where she needs to when she comes across other photos after filling an album.
Part of the problem for many of us is that we don't have all our photos in one place. A growing number of online photo companies are competing to solve this problem for us.
Shutterfly.com started out in 1999 and has been doubling its revenue each year since. Its customers can have their photos stored, e-mailed, developed and fine-tuned on the Shutterfly Web site. Seventy percent of those customers are women, the majority mothers of young children.
"They might just have 15 minutes at night to get things organized," said Shutterfly spokeswoman, Bridgette Thomas. "They can do as much as they can, save that and then come back to it later."
You can upload photos from a digital camera directly to Shutter-fly's Web site. You can download the software to allow you to do this without having to figure out the software that goes with your specific camera.
Once the images are on the Web site you have several options. You can e-mail friends and family a photo and message containing a link that will allow them to log onto Shutterfly's site and go straight into the folder you've created. This allows friends to view multiple pictures without you having to send them multiple e-mails. There is no charge for sharing or storing.
Shutterfly will develop pictures within 24 hours of your Internet request and ship them from their California lab. Thomas said they would make it here in about three to four days or you could pay extra for overnight delivery. A 4-by-6-inch print costs 29 cents. Then shipping, for example, would cost $1.99 for 20 photos or $2.49 for 30 photos. Multiple sizes, from wallets to posters, are available.
Shutterfly can also be an easy way to give personal gifts. Since all your photos are in their system, with the click of a mouse you can order any picture to be scanned on a coffee mug, apron, mouse pad, tote bag or other item and have it shipped directly to grandparents or yourself.
You can also make your own hard-bound book with up to four pictures and captions printed on each page. A 20-page book costs $29.99. Each additional page, up to 100 pages, costs $1. Paperback books costs $12.99 for 20 pages and 50 cents for each additional page.
"We also offer free editing tools to eliminate red eye, crop it, change the color to black and white or add a border," Thomas said.
The most attractive feature to me? You can have all your photos stored in one place without having to burn copies of CDs or back up your own system. (We learned the hard way if you don't do this and your computer crashes you lose all your digital photos.)
"We don't position ourselves as a storage company but that is a difference from our competitors. We don't ever delete photos," Thomas said. "We save images in multiple places and we've never lost an image since our first upload."
I've decided to turn my photo developing and digital storage over to Shutterfly. But I think I'll still stick with the fake leather photo albums with pages that hold eight photos in plastic sleeves. There's a space next to each photo to jot a few lines about the picture. I have never tried scrapbooking but I must admit I'm an uneducated critic. It's hard enough to just get the photos into a book.
Scrapbooking, it seems, makes the process take a lot longer and more expensive. These are pictures of our families. Aren't they interesting and cute enough without little paper cutouts decorating each page?
It's not that photos of our family need enhancing it's the fact that they deserve enhancing, said Elizabeth Nelson, a scrapbook designer with her own company called Art From the Heart.
"Scrapbooking allows you to journal and include a computer or handwritten journal that tells the pieces of the story that aren't explained in the picture," she said. "Photography is just the beginning of the page design. You can take the photo and add to the story by using creative ideas - dye cuts, stickers, journaling - to enhance it."
The mistake many people make, she told me, is they want to put every picture in an embellished scrapbook. This is too much work. Nelson suggests parents pick just a few photos to scrapbook and keep the rest in a traditional photo album or photo box. But doesn't that mean scrapbooking creates more work for busy parents?
"Scrapbooking is not for everybody. It would be somebody who's motivated to make a memory album," she said. But doing one scrapbook a year doesn't take up that much time, she added.
If you do want to start scrapbooking, start with photos you're taking now, she advised. "Don't dive into past pictures. Then you're always behind," Nelson pointed out.
Nelson is offering a scrapbooking workshop at the St. Petersburg Main Library Oct. 23 to teach people how to enhance one photo on one scrapbook page that can be framed. The workshop goes from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and costs $25 a person, which includes all supplies. Call 520-9889 to sign up with questions.
You can reach Katherine Snow Smith by e-mail at snowsmith@verizon.net or write Rookie Mom, St. Petersburg Times, PO Box 1121, St. Petersburg, FL 33731.
