When Did You Last Look at Your Photos from 2013?

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family album with DVD

Remember 2013? Hmm. . . if someone asked me straight out what was great about last year, I truly don’t know what I would say. Life is so busy, I can’t remember last week much less over a year ago.

This is a shame, because my family has amazingly fun memories to share and celebrate together. So I tried out something new – making a digital photo album with just my 2013 photos in it. See the photo above.

I’m holding the photobook open to our 2013 Hartmann Family Reunion pictures. Look at Alex holding that basketball – he’d won it in our famous brown bag auction and wasn’t going to let anyone take it away from him!

Check out a few more pages . . . I really have to say, my eyes tear up when I think about all the blessings my family has had. Below are photos from New Year’s Eve at my dear friend Tammy’s house – was so much fun. My husband was a nurse at the time and had to work the night shift – so my kids and I had an absolute blast with Tammy, friends, neighbors and a whole houseful of kids.

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Oh my goodness, 2013 was the year we drove to Yellowstone National Park – oh the sites we saw. My book has four pages and 24 photos that capture the best of the best moments from that trip. And my kids had such an adventure. We highly recommend Yellowstone for your next summer vacation!

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Then there’s the holidays. . . I have about four pages of holiday photos, just enough to capture the essence of celebrating Christmas with the family. This is the first page of December memories with me and the kids making Christmas cookies and photos of snow – and our crazy dog Tillie jumping to catch snow flung at her!

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I love that my family has a physical book to look through and see how much fun and adventure we have together.

How would you feel showing a book like this to show your children, family and friends with your best moments of 2013?

You can experience it yourself – with the Pixologie Digital Family Photo Album with DVD. After showing this concept to people, overwhelmingly, the consensus was that we should continue making these books for others who want to celebrate and share the best stories of their lives!

Click here to learn more – http://www.pixologieinc.com.

To order a Digital Family Photo Album with DVD  – http://www.shop.pixologieinc.com

Fantastic Vacation Photos? Don’t bet on your phone or Facebook being the place to store those memories!

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Capturing City Center at Dusk in Las Vegas

Viva Las Vegas! I just finished an amazing trip out to Nevada’s hottest spot (literally!) where the day offers beautiful scenic day trips and the nightlife is loud, eye-popping and colorful. Truly a great girls trip to celebrate one turning 40, we took nearly 500 photos!

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Some of our best moments . . .
  • Checking out the Fremont Street Experience
  • Trekking around Charleston Mountain
  • Conquering the Strip
  • Traveling through the Valley of Fire
  • Sweating it out at Hoover Dam

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As a professional photo organizer, I loved all the opportunities to take pictures of these spots with my traditional digital camera. My girlfriends, by comparison, spent some of their photographic time composing selfies with their smartphones.
 
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Such an interesting contrast of how we wanted to capture our vacation. And I learned a lot about how my friends manage their photos.  Here’s what I found fascinating as I know many other people have similar habits:
  • Smartphones are their photo home. One of my friends actually pulled up a photo on her phone from her last Vegas trip which was several years ago.
  • Facebook is another home of their photos. My other friend was hoping I could upload my photos so they posted on her timeline. As hard as I tried to get my album up so that it would be on her timeline, I couldn’t figure it out. In order to make it work, she took screen shots of my Facebook album to make her own album to post.
  • Each of them have an iPhone with a PhotoStream to make the sharing process much easier – but they (as many do) found it confusing to access and navigate.
 
I know that we are bombarded with photo apps and social media opportunities to share our fun memories. And in the short term, this is great. We loved for our friends and family to track what we experienced on our trip.
 
For the long term, I wouldn’t want to bet on smartphones and social media to be the place where I go to find my photos and enjoy the memories.
 
Here’s my few suggestions on how to manage your photos once so that the sharing, celebrating and remembering is accomplished all at once!
 
  1. Take your wonderful photos (all of them – both on smartphone and camera) Delete the ones you don’t want.
  2. Download the photos to your computer – save in a consistent place (Mac – iPhoto; PC – Windows Explorer)
  3. Review again and delete unneeded photos
  4. Then share to your social media, order prints, etc. and enjoy.
I would love to help you with your photo questions. Feel free to email me at mollieb@pixologieinc.com and let’s get your memories in a better place!
 
In the meantime, enjoy this final selfie of the three of us – it’s my favorite from the whole trip!
 

I love this selfie of all us three gals!