Our Favorite Ways to Use and Preserve Photos

If you’re anything like us, your phone is jam packed full of photos of your kids… photos that never exist as anything other than a .jpeg. We want to inspire you (and us) to change that! With so many options for printing, displaying, and using your photos, there’s bound to be a way that lets you enjoy and preserve these precious snapshots of your life.

Print, print, print!

Have you ever lost track of time sifting through a box of old family photos? There’s something so fun and nostalgic about looking through them. With the rate at which technology updates and changes, it’s tricky to know how to best keep a digital archive, which is why we’re huge fans of printing your favorite images! This way you’ll always have physical copies (you know, in case the internet somehow disappears tomorrow) that you’re more likely to see since they’re living outside your phone.

One of the simplest ways to preserve your photos is to print your own box of family photos. It can be as organized (or unorganized) as you want it to be, but it’s a lower-stakes way to print and keep photos. We like to order prints at Costco and pick them up whenever we need to make a run there! Staying on top of printing photos throughout the year makes it a less overwhelming task.

Printing albums is another way to preserve photos that can be as simple as uploading to Instagram. Chatbooks will automatically print a photo book from your camera roll or social media for $10 on a monthly basis – how easy is that?! If you want a more curated look, Artifact Uprising has beautiful options for albums as well as individual prints or even calendars.

Show them off!

Once you motivate yourself to actually print photos, there are a wealth of options for displaying them. A gallery wall, individual frames on shelves or bedside tables, a giant 3x5 foot print of your family photo, wall calendars – there are so many ways to show off your beautiful family photos! 

However you decide to display photos, try swapping them out a couple times a year to help your space feel updated and fresh. This is why we love Mixtiles! It’s a fun option for creating a gallery wall that’s low-stress. They’ll print and frame your photos in frames that can stick and unstick from the wall, which means no holes in your wall and you can rearrange whenever you want.

Framebridge is another great option for creating a gallery wall. You design your gallery wall online, upload your photos, and they’ll print, frame, and ship your photos with a lifesize hanging guide (which is so helpful if you’re like us and still get the measurement wrong after double-checking). We love how beautiful and easy their service is!

Back it up!

Don’t forget to back up those photos like mad! Nothing is more heartbreaking than having a device or hard drive crash with no way to retrieve precious photos. We like to have photos backed up on a couple of physical hard drives in addition to cloud storage. One of our favorite backup services is Backblaze – it’s affordable, has unlimited storage, and they’ll send you a hard drive of recovered files in the mail if your computer crashes. They can even locate your computer if it gets lost or stolen. You can’t beat that kind of peace of mind!

What are your favorite ways to print, display, or back up photos? Tell us in the comments below!