12 Days of Christmas Blog Hop – Photo Fun

I was so pleased when Martin Crosbie invited me to participate in this 12 Days of Christmas blog hop.  Martin was pretty broad about the topic, so I thought I’d talk about having fun with your photos at Christmas.

Not just taking a fun photo (as pictured here), but doing fun stuff with your photos. Back in 2008, when this pic was taken, I started doing a holiday card and website for my family. This was before Facebook was ubiquitous and if you wanted to share digital pics with family members you had to email them around, and hope your email didn’t get blocked because the attachment file sizes were too large. Or you had to create your own website.   Having created a website for my wedding, the task seemed easy enough, and I set up a website where I posted a holiday letter wrapping up our year along with lots of photos.

Ever since starting my holiday card and website, I’ve thought the Christmas season was a fabulous time to review your year in photos and do some fun stuff with them. If you send a detailed holiday card, you’re already thinking about what highlights of your year to mention. Well, go ahead and find the accompanying photos to go with them. Once you find them, copy them into a new folder on your computer. Call it YEAR_wrapup (so 2014_wrapup this year; 2015_wrapup next year.) If you put the year in the folder name, it’s easy to search for it.  You’ll often have forgotten what great pics you took, or what a wonderful time you had. So, it’s a joy to go through the photos.

Once you’ve found photos you like, you can do a bunch of holiday related things with them. Compiling the photos into a photo book for a relative is a great idea. I’ve found parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles like these. You can use them to make other photo related products, too. I’ve gotten my parents a fleece photo blanket, so they can keep warm under photos of their grandkids. Most photo developers (Costco, Walmart, Shutterfly) make photo books, and photo blankets are made by a number of companies as well (Shutterfly and Collage.com).

Including a photo sheet in your holiday card is an option, and so is posting the photos online for your family to see. Don’t know how to create a website online? You don’t have to. If all the people you want to see the photos are on Facebook with you, you can create an album there. If they’re not, then you can create a Google Drive album. This is pretty simple. You create a new Folder on Google Drive, then you upload all the photos you want to include. Next,  you share it with “Anyone who has the link.” These are the directions, if you’re not familiar with how that’s done (I only learned this recently, from my husband). If you want to know how it looks, this is a folder I’ve shared with anyone who clicks on this link.

I’m putting the finishing touches on my holiday card website for this year, and having just gone through the photos, and I can say truthfully, it’s a lot of fun. I hope you’ll give it a try.

-RJ Crayton

Happy Holidays to you – and remember Life First is on sale for the holidays!

 

P.S. For those looking for the Friday Favorite Christmas song, I’m going to run that post on Sunday. I got confused about which day the 12 Days of Christmas blog needed to run, so I moved the song post to Sunday, but you can still pretend it’s Friday when you read it, if that makes you feel better. 🙂