We all dream of those getaways to fun, interesting and/or exotic locations. You pack the camera, or several, and snap away at the scenery and your family. A week (or more) later you return with a thousand (or more) photos. Eek! What is a scrapper to do?
OK, back to today’s post and how not to get overwhelmed by the endless trail of vacation photos.
1. Just breathe – Start with letting go of perfectionism. Be OK with simply telling the story and not scrapping even a majority of the photos.
2. Make a photo book – Take this opportunity to keep it simple and let someone else do the layout work. If you’re a Mac user, I highly recommend the books you can create straight from iPhoto. They are a little pricey but of top-notch quality.
3. Use 4×6 photo pages – While they are a little hard to find, 12×12 page protectors that hold 4×6 photos do exist. Scrap the highlights of your trip and print the remaining photos to complete the album.
4. Share on Flickr – Keep the best trip photos on hand for scrapping projects, but tell the vacation story by sharing the pics in an online album.
5. Scrap the recap – Use those templates with thumbnail-sized photos to create a recap of your trip. Include it in a photo book or compliment this recap with a few favorite layouts or prints of your trip.
Bonus Tip – If you’re just an average Jane with a few above-average camera skills, shoot in RAW only indoors or at night. Most cameras can take pretty good shots outside in daylight, requiring only small boosts of exposure, contrast, saturation and sharpness. More importantly, it would be nice to complete post-processing before your next vacation.
Now I don’t believe any of you were planning to scrap 1000 photos, but I hope some of these tips will encourage you to scale back your plans to what is truly essential for capturing those memories.
How do you get a handle on gobs of vacation photos? Do you have any tips for staying sane?
I’m handling all of my photos from our Road Trip last summer by using Nancy Comelab’s cluster frame sets. They help me get a lot of photos in one page.
Oh great tips, I have filed them away for future use! 😉
My tip for scrapping the vacation photos is to travel with a small notebook and make time at the end of each day to write down the important places you went and what you did/saw that day. I find myself forgetting the details otherwise. I did this on my last vacation to the Big Island of Hawaii and I was able to blog and scrap all the details later, because of the daily written records I kept.