Travel tip: What you can do with all those pictures you took from vacation

Traveling and vacation should be fun and full of good memories. Along with those trips come pictures, lots of pictures. Travel tip? O.k.

Whether they now live on your external hard drive, an SD card, computer, phone, or in that space everyone calls “the cloud” your pictures from vacation are taking up space and if you happen to be my mother in law, you have all of your devices linked and that means the same picture is taking up space on three or more devices. So what should you do with all those images?

In the past, you would put them on a CD and look at them later. Or you would put them on a thumb drive, categorized all nice and neat but finding what you are looking for can be hard and if your images are in the cloud, good luck.

There are better options and while some of them may take a little bit of time, you can enjoy the memories that come with them.

Make a book: Web sites like Shutterfly.com have great deals throughout the year that will allow you to make something like a coffee table book or a calendar, or even blankets. With quite a few discounts, there is no reason for you to not take advantage. I used images I took from several vacations to make a coffee table book of beach and sealife and it still gets a lot of attention from our guests. How easy is it to put all your “Smith family 2021 Disney trip” into a hardback for under $50.00?

Sort and store: It takes a lot of time but you really should go through your photos and sort them into a folder by child’s name or by theme. It will make it easier to find them later. This can be time-consuming, especially if you take hundreds of pictures. That is me. I take at least a hundred pictures on my trips. I have an entire folder dedicated to dolphins that I have photographed in the wild. Am I really going to do much with them? Personally, probably not but when I write, I have options to use those images and you may as well someday.

Print: My wife loves to print pictures and make scrapbook albums. That, like sorting, can be time-consuming but it often cheaper than having a hardcover book made. Unless of course, you have to run out and buy all the craft stuff, and then it can be a push! You will have the privilege of saying you created both the pictures and the display.

Put it on a wall: Several website companies offer canvas printing and if you have that terrific picture you want to see every day, why not have it blown up and canvassed?

Make a memory wall: In our home, we have an upstairs hallway that all of the bedrooms are off of. Both walls have become our memory walls. Framed and mounted along the wall are pictures of our family vacations. Some will remain forever while others will be reframed with new images every year or so. We put the old pictures behind the new ones and we get a big smile when we change them out and see the old ones we forget we had.

Display them on a device: Sometimes technology can be a wonderful thing. In our home, we have two Alexa devices that show our family pictures, and as they rotate we get to see a variety of pictures that represent our entire digital aged life. From our 2-year-olds baby pictures to our 17-year-olds first day of school. If you take a lot of pictures, it is a must-have for your home.

There are a lot of things you can do with your images and while we tend to end up with hundreds of pictures, finding the right way to display them can be a challenge. These are some ideas of what you can do with your pictures. Let us know in the comments other ways you have found to use those life-lasting memories.