I sometimes wonder which photos my kids will care about most someday. Will it be the big family vacation? Their birthday party? Christmas morning, or will it be the random picture I took on a Tuesday because they looked so little sitting at the kitchen table?
And I know. You’re probably like me and you take pictures constantly. Your kids eating breakfast. The funny thing they said. A Saturday at the park. A blurry photo of them sleeping in the car. Birthday parties, vacations, Christmas mornings, messy bedrooms, grocery store trips, and approximately 47 photos of your child doing the same cute thing.
By the end of the year, you have thousands of photos. And most of them? They just sit there.
Please Print the Photos on Your Phone
This is my little plea to you. Print the photos.
Not just the beautiful family photos where everyone is dressed and looking at the camera. Print the photos from your phone, too. The ordinary ones. The ones where your kids are covered in something they shouldn’t be covered in. The picture you took because you wanted to remember how little they looked sitting in that chair. The random Tuesday afternoon photo that doesn’t seem important enough to frame.
Because those are the moments that make up a life.
I think about my kids looking back at these photos in twenty or thirty years. Of course, I want them to remember the vacations and birthdays and big milestones, but I also want them to remember what being little actually felt like.
What our house looked like, their favorite pajamas were, funny things they did when nobody was watching, our dog they climbed on, weird places they hid, the completely ordinary moments that felt so ordinary at the time.
If you took a picture, it was meaningful to you for some reason. Don’t be so quick to decide it isn’t worth keeping now.
My Old Way of Doing Things
For years, I would try to make a yearly Chatbook-style photo book. I used Mixbook, and I really did love the finished product. It was cute, fun, and such a great way to preserve memories. But creating it? It took forever.
I would sit down with hundreds and hundreds of photos and try to narrow them down. Then I’d arrange them, resize them, choose layouts, and inevitably realize there were still so many photos I wanted to include. I felt like I had to choose between creating a beautiful book and actually including all the moments I wanted to remember. A few years ago, I decided to simplify things. And honestly? I’ll probably never go back.
My Simple System for Printing a Year’s Worth of Photos
At the end of the year, I go through my phone and select the photos I want to print. It usually takes me around 30 minutes, which is honestly the perfect thing to do while walking on the treadmill. If you’re really on top of it, I aspire to create favorites at the end of each month so that at the end of the year I just go to my favorites folder a print those. Alas, I haven’t reached that level of adulting yet.
When I’m selecting photos, I don’t overthink it. I select the big moments, of course. Birthdays. Holidays. Trips. First days. Celebrations, but I also select the simple stuff. The photo of my kid covered in Vaseline, someone hiding under the sink, a random moment where they were playing with the dog, the little things that probably wouldn’t make it into a carefully curated photo book but tell the real story of our year.
Then I print them.
That’s it.
Where I Print Our Everyday Photos
For our everyday iPhone photos, I love using FreePrints. I’ve also used SnapFish. To be honest, it’s just usually whoever can give me the best deal on printing a year’s worth of photos…
I’m not affiliated with them. I just genuinely like how easy the app makes the process.
One of my favorite things is that you can connect it to wherever you already store your photos, making it easy to select images directly from your phone or other photo storage. They also offer a feature where you can print the date and location on the back of the photo, and I love that because while I think I’ll remember exactly when and where every photo was taken, I definitely won’t.
Having those little details on the back makes organizing the photos easier, but it’s also just really fun to look back and remember where we were.
A little note: I always recommend printing your professional family photos through a professional lab. The quality really does make a difference. But for everyday iPhone photos? This system works perfectly for us.
Why I Choose Prints Instead of Another Photo Book
A few years ago, we lost a lot of photos from several trips we took early in our marriage. Thankfully, I had printed a few of them in a Mixbook photo book, but a lot of the pictures had been resized to fit into cute little boxes and I couldn’t make a copy of them or use them elsewhere.
I realized I didn’t just want the memories preserved in a book, I wanted the actual photographs. I wanted to be able to pull one out, make a copy, frame it, give it to someone, or hold it in my hands.
There’s something about a physical photograph that feels different to me. Maybe it’s because I grew up with photo albums or, it’s because I know technology changes.
Phones break. Hard drives fail. Cloud storage isn’t always as permanent as we think it is.
But mostly?
I think it’s because photographs were made to be looked at.
Not just scrolled past.
How I Organize Everything
I use a simple photo album with individual slots for each print.
There are so many great options out there, but I like albums that hold a lot of photos because I don’t want to feel like I have to narrow down my favorites. We usually have about 600 photos (including our professional family photos).
I organize everything chronologically by month, which is incredibly easy when the date is printed on the back.
January.
February.
March.
And so on.
Then the album slowly fills with an entire year of our lives.
Not just the highlight reel. The whole story.
My Favorite Part
Our albums sit in our family room, and one of my favorite things is catching my kids flipping through them.
They point at people they know, remember places we’ve been, laugh at themselves when they were smaller and sometimes they ask questions about a moment I had completely forgotten.
That’s when I’m reminded why I do it. Not because every photo is beautiful or deserves to be framed in my entryway, but because these little moments deserve a life outside of my camera roll.
Someday, these albums will tell my kids the story of their childhood in a way that thousands of forgotten photos on an old phone never could.
So, this is your reminder.
You don’t have to make the perfect photo book.
You don’t have to narrow your year down to the very best 100 pictures.
You don’t need to create another complicated project for yourself.
Just print the photos.
The messy ones.
The blurry ones.
The ordinary ones.
The ones that don’t seem important yet.
Because someday, I think you’ll be really glad you did.
