The next question, then, is what do you do with all those photos? And is anyone else but you going to get to look at them? I would go broke if I tried to print them all out. And I wouldn't even want to print them out because I have no time to compile photo albums anymore and no place to store big bulky photo albums anyway.
But I do like to have some photos printed in a non-digital/non-computer format and I do like to be able to share photos with family, so I have found a friend in Shutterfly.
One of my solutions to my photo mania has been to create a photo sharing site on shutterfly. There, I upload the best of my pictures every month or so. I also add journal entries from time to time to keep track of how the kids are growing and share some of the milestones they reach. The people who benefit most from this are my siblings, parents, and in-laws because they are the ones who actually do want to see all the thousands of my pictures. I've added friends and other relatives as members of my share site as well, but I can set it so they receive site updates much less frequently than the immediate family. I don't want anyone to feel that I'm spamming them with my photos!
It must be a trendsetting idea because after I set up my first share site when Kid #1 was born at least 7 or 8 friends set up their own share sites and sent me a link to view their photos. I love it because it enables me to see pictures of my friends kids growing up too!
I also like that I have a majority of my best pictures saved on the Shutterfly website. In the unfortunate event that something happened to my computer and my backup hard drive at least I'd still have my memories somewhere!
I admit that it does take time to maintain the share site, but I'm pretty obsessive-compulsive about my pictures and Shutterfly makes it as easy as possible to do.
Since all my favorite pictures are already uploaded on Shutterfly, I use the Shutterfly photo books for my family photo albums. They are much less bulky and can hold many more pictures than a traditional album. I've been making one photo book per year and think they are great memories to have!
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