Creative Gift Ideas

Given that photographs are mostly digital now, it is not hard to lose them. Memory cards are larger and larger so it takes longer and longer to download the pictures. It’s easy to forget or put it off, and just as easy to lose the tiny memory cards, or folders full of pictures if the disk on your computer should crash. That did happen to me once when I lost a whole summer’s worth of pictures, along with some of a pictures of a much loved dog, which though I didn’t know at the time, were the last I would take of him.

These are a few tips for you to consider.

1. Use a digital camera and a portable printer. Take the printer with you on vacation and start your scrapbooking on a rainy day, you can always add to or alter your layouts later, but at least you can be sure your photographs are safe. Remember to print out at least one set of your pictures even though you just want to keep them on your PC.  

2. Buy many small memory cards and a storage wallet rather than one super large memory card. Some of my memory cards take so long to download now that’s one of the reasons I put off printing the pictures. 

3. Clean all your memory cards before going on vacation. Keep your memory cards in order then you’ll find it easier to find the picture you want.

4. When you buy a printer choose one with it’s own memory card interface so you can print direct without using a computer.  

5. The places that develop pictures usually have machines to do regular printouts too. Much like in the past, you can go to your local pharmacy and have them print out the pictures from your memory cards. 

6. Perfection is not a necessity. Pictures that have not been digitally manipulated can be used too. The fastest and simplest cropping tool is a pair of scissors.

7. Be careful in storing your pictures. As the resolution of digital cameras improves, our photographs get bigger and bigger.  If you take a lot of pictures you need a lot of storage for them, and if you want to be able to get to them all the time you need to keep them on disk. Network attached storage is a way of buying more diskspace and attaching it to your network rather than to any one individual computer. You’ll be able to access the pictures from any computer in the house and using wireless digital photoframes display the pictures in a constantly moving slideshow.

8. Give your pictures meaningful names. It can be frustrating trying to find a picture and not remembering where you saved it. I find it very worthwhile to spend time naming the pictures when I download a memory card. Then I can find them with a simple search.

9. Get organized using tools or software that can file your pictures. Picasa from google is a free tool you can use to organize your photographs and share them on the web. Graphic programs like photoshop elements also contain an organizer function which allows you to tag pictures individually or in groups.  

10. Burn your pictures to a CD or DVD for a more long term storage. The best solution of all is to write your photographs to DVD as soon as you download them. You can then store the DVD carefully for the future (labeled with your vacation date) and should your pictures ever get lost or destroyed you can restore them from your DVD backup.

The best solution is not to put off the scrapbooking! Get your pictures and albums out and start creating more records of you precious family memories.