In a previous blog I admitted to being a snap happy parent. I also noted that since my daughter’s birth (more than 3 years ago) I have taken nearly 9,000 photos of her. That’s 9,000 printed images that have been sorted and placed in photo albums or frames. Needless to say my photo album collection is quite vast.
Given that the average photo album holds up to 200 4×6 pictures (I do have some that hold up to 500-plus) I have roughly 40 albums sitting on a single bookcase in my living room. I would love to say that each is neatly placed in chronological order from my daughter’s birth to the present day, but I’m not that organized. The photos in the albums are placed in chronological order but the albums themselves do not sit on the shelf in the same order.
They would be if I hadn’t found a wooden album that I absolutely fell in love with made especially for vacation photos. Not only is it made from a beautiful stained wood but the cover also features an etched shot of a palm tree, which is perfect since all the photos that I have cataloged in the albums were taken in Hawaii. In the last two years I have purchased eight of the wooden photo albums and diligently placed the pictures from our annual trips to the “Aloha State” in each one. The end result: whenever anyone wants to see photos of our latest trip I don’t have to fumble through albums looking for vacation pics. I simply direct them to the shelf that contains the wooden albums.
So what’s the photo revelation I referred to in the title of this blog? Is it the decision to place all of our vacation photos in the same type of albums?
Not quite.
The other day I had an AHA! moment when I was visiting one of my former colleagues. As we were about to leave her home my friend’s son asked if he could show me pictures from their recent trip to Disneyland. To my surprise the books that looked like a set of encyclopedias neatly displayed on a wall unit in my friend’s family room were actually matching photo albums. Like me she fell in love with a particular album and instead of mixing and matching dozens of different style albums she bought 20 of her favorite one. But unlike me she is using the same album style to house her entire photo collection.
I couldn’t believe I had never thought of doing the same thing. Whereas some people would say the idea of having a single style of photo albums is boring I have to admit the end result of having them lined up on a single bookcase creates a very uniform image. It was appealing to me. In fact, they didn’t even look like albums. They looked more like a set of harmonious history books.
Was does your photo album collection look like? Would you consider buying multiple copies of the same album to create a uniform look?
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