Three Ways to Share a Family Photo Collection
Do you have a large family photo collection? Photos you’ve taken, or that have been placed in your hands? Or perhaps you have family traditions repeated year after year that are documented with photos? How do you share them with your family?
I recently had the pleasure of scanning and organizing a large family photo collection dating back to the 1800s. I have had many of these projects - generally one member of the family is the keeper of all of the old photos, and then doesn’t know what to do with them or how to share. Often no one else wants them … until they do.
Luckily there are some great ways to share these memories with the whole family.
Often these collections come in two parts. Old prints and more recent digital photos. I scan the old prints and incorporate them into the digital library.
If you only have a small amount of photos you can email them, create a shared album from your phone, or send them via a cloud storage service like Dropbox. But if you have a lot - say hundreds or thousands of photos - these methods don’t work. So here are my top three ways to share a larger collection with family and friends
Save Photos to an External Hard Drive or Flash Drive
Simply copy the photos onto a drive, put it in a nice box, and hand it over. It’s amazing to me that these little drives can hold so many photos - I’ve seen flash drives with as much as 2TB on them! I’ve had several clients actually request the larger external hard drive though because the little ones are too easy to lose. This is an easy, inexpensive sharing solution, but it’s harder to actually enjoy the photos on these drives as they are harder to search, and you need to click open files one by one. At the least, they make a safe backup copy of your photos. At best, it is a cheap way to make sure everyone the collection.
2. Create a Photo Album
The best thing about an album is the ability to tell a particular story. Photos are thoughtfully placed in a purposeful order, captions or prose next to the photos tell the story in a particular voice. You can’t include all of your hundreds or thousands of photos as no one would be able to lift such a book, but it’s a great way to share the very best. And, once the album is designed, it's easy to create and ship copies to the rest of your family. I’m currently designing several books for clients, including a 50th wedding anniversary celebration that combines both new and old photos, and 10 years of memories from yearly family gatherings at a lake house. In both we pull just the best photos, and arrange them in a particular and thoughtful way to tell a story that might otherwise be lost.
A page from a photo album of our family trip to Washington last summer.
3. Use an Online Photo Gallery
Host the photos in an online gallery. This is my favorite way to both share and preserve photos. Once they are loaded into a gallery, share the link with anyone you like and everyone has full access to the photos. They can download, add commentary, and share with others. You can view in slideshow mode on a big screen, or access the entire collection from your phone.
My SmugMug gallery of birds.
This may seem daunting for older generations, but I’ve found that anyone can handle a web link as that is literally all they need to view the photos. As I mentioned up top, you can add the scanned photos to the collection just as easily as the digital photos. There are two services I like for this purpose, SmugMug and FOREVER. SmugMug is yearly subscription that includes unlimited photos and videos, making it great for large collections where you may not want to keep all of these photos forever, but want to keep and give access for a certain amount of time. As an amateur nature photographer, I use SmugMug to house and share my thousands of bird photos. Trust me when I say that no one will want these when I’m gone. But for my family photos, including those that I have scanned going back as far as the 1800s, I use FOREVER. With FOREVER, you purchase storage up front, and FOREVER guarantees to keep your photos safe and accessible for your lifetime plus 100 years.
My FOREVER gallery of family.
What is the right solution for you? Think about what you have and how you want to share it. You can use one, two, or all three of these solutions alone or in tandem.
I’d be happy to talk through these solutions with you, or assist you in implementing any of them. Reach out to me today and we can chat about your needs.
Two final notes:
Sign up with me for a digital and/or scanning project by the end of December 2021, and I will include 100 free scans. Email or chat with me for details and limitations. We can start your project in 2022.
If you sign up for FOREVER through my link, you get a $20 coupon and I get a small commission. There is no extra cost to you, and I’ll be able to help you if needed.