Photo hoarders be gone! 5 tips for turning your phone pics into frameables (or books!)

April 10, 2017

We all know a photo hoarder. And, I hate to break it to you – if you don’t know one, you ARE one. And that’s OK, it’s a big club. Some of us are members too (including this writer).
Just ask me to take a picture of you with my phone and you’ll get an, “OK, say cheese! Oh. Wait. Hold that pose!” I’ll shout, as I delete a few old photos to make room for yet another.

My photos eventually make it onto my Google Drive, but they collect months – sometimes years – of dust until the photo-hoarding guilt finally takes over and I order a few prints online.

We at Waldo are working hard to rid the world of bad photo hoarding habits (our own included). Our app is an amazing tool for sharing all your special moments with the people who want to see them. (We’re a photo finding phenom that finds photos of you taken by other people and delivers them directly to your phone.)

Download the free app here. It’s super fun!

Once you have all these photos on your phone, then it’s time to turn them into something more.

5 ways to turn your phone pics into frameables

Design coffee table photo books.

I love these books and it’s always my goal to make one after every family vacation and every year my kids turn another year older. They also make gorgeous and meaningful gifts for grandparents and friends. And best of all? They’re easy to make and affordable. Try Mixbook for a user-friendly platform with beautiful templates of all sizes and themes.



—-> Creative tip: Looking for a gift for the little ones in your life? Create a storybook for them, where you use actual photos of them in a story where they are the main characters. I do this every Christmas for nieces and nephews and they’ve become keepsakes we all treasure. 


Frame them.

If you’re anything like me, a blank space on the wall is a canvas of infinite opportunities, a place begging for some framed family memories. (Sometimes, that white wall is a spot where a toddler became an emboldened artist with a red crayon and it just needs to be covered. With anything. Maybe even a mugshot of the guilty party.)

 

Frame your phone pics


Put them on canvas.

Order prints on canvas or gallery-style block prints, a beautiful way to display your family’s memories on the walls of your home.

Try Easy Canvas Prints, who offers great deals on canvas (and is a fellow Austin, Texas business!).


Create a video.

Do you remember the days of sitting around an old projector watching crackly black and white films of your parents and grandparents? If not, congratulations on being younger than me.

These days, it’s easy as apple pie to drop photos into a video editing program and create a home video that your family will love to watch on the big screen with large bowls of popcorn in lap. You can even put them in black and white for old time’s sake.

Try a free version of Animoto for an easy drag-and-drop video editor that can create professional-looking videos out of your photos and video clips. 

Create a video from your photos.


Connect to a digital frame.

For the technologically challenged folks in your life, consider purchasing a digital frame.

I did this for grandparents this year and they’ve never felt so connected to our lives. Every evening, we email any photo we want to share directly to the frame and it immediately pops up, showing them the special moments from our day. Try Skylight, which is a touch-screen photo frame you can update by email from anywhere.

 


Have another way to turn your photos into lifelong memories? Share with us in the comments below!