How to store your photographs and enjoy them

We all enjoy the nostalgia of looking over old photographs

The way we keep photographs has changed radically over the past few years.

While we used to store our photographs in a physical form, they’re now all digital. Follow our suggestions to ensure your precious pics are in a safe place.

Keep your precious memories safe and secure, and showcase your best!

The old days of photographs…

Do you remember the excitement of waiting for your photographs to be developed? Dropping the film off at your local chemist and waiting (often for 2 weeks!) for those precious snaps to be printed onto photo paper. The results were very often disappointing – light had got into the camera, that perfect shot you thought you had caught had been missed by a second, heads were missing off the top of the shot. Without the ability to refer to that scene we were taking, it was very hit and miss when using film.

The positive of film though, was the real actual prints we had. We chose the best to be stored lovingly in family albums; a compendium of memories of birthdays, Christmases and holidays. My children were giggling at the fashions (particularly the hairtsyles!) in our old green family album just the other day.

Now the majority of the photographs we take are stored on our phones, it’s important to keep them secure – and to enjoy them.

How to store your digital photographs:

Firstly, be a little ruthless. We can take as many images as we want now that we don’t have the limit of a 24 exposure film. Go through your photographs and delete those that you don’t want to keep.

Now’s the time to save them. You could upload them to your computer and save them onto a memory stick or an external hard drive (available online or phone a high street tech shop). Or set up cloud storage that automatically saves your photographs when your phone is connected to wifi. It’s really simple to set up. I use Google Photos, but you could also store your images on the Apple Cloud if you have an iPhone, or on Amazon Prime, if you have an account. Sometimes you have to pay if you have a lot of photographs to store, but it’s usually only a couple of pounds per month.

Then enjoy them! After every holiday, we use Snapfish to make an album of our favourite images. We keep this stack of albums in the living room cupboard where we can browse and smile whenever the mood takes us; a great activity for a rainy day. There are many more online options for creating photo books: Photobox, Vistaprint, Bonusprint… the list goes on.

Other options

Photo collages are also a wonderful way to showcase your memories. Buy a multi-image frame and order a print selection of your favourite shots. Or print each photo individually and make a photo wall. There are apps and websites, such as MixTiles where you can print snaps and create an eye-catching display.

For a particularly stunning image, get a canvas printed for you wall. Websites like Poster Print offer canvases, even including panoramic shots. Our favourite Gower walk is preserved on a long canvas as you can see on this blog.

As the nights start to draw in, use this time to enjoy all those wonderful memories you have made and the images you have captured. Enjoy!