Printing Your 365 Project | Boston Family Photographer
It’s January 1st and you just completed your 365 Project. You took one photo a day, every single day, for 365 days. Congratulations! But now what? What happens to those 365 images of your daily life? Let’s talk about printing your 365 project.
Printing Your 365 Project
Because, let’s be serious, you absolutely cannot let all that hard work rot on a hard drive somewhere. For the last two years, I have been printing all 365 images in one album at the end of the year. One giant family album to tell the story of our year. Not only do I treasure these albums, my kids do too!
This brings me to my first post-365 tip!
Don’t Make Your Album Too Precious to Handle
I know, you did ALL this work and you want to create a beautiful keepsake out of it. BUT. For me, seeing my kids thumb through our family albums and comment and point out all of their favorite things from the year is priceless. For me…that means I want to spend no more than $100. Otherwise I’ll be freaking out every time they handle it. This year I went with mpix and their Panoramic Premium Albums. I chose the largest size which is 11 x 8.5 with a linen cover. With a coupon code (highly recommend waiting for one!) it was $84 for 91 pages. This particular album allows up to 100 pages.
I think the linen/color is beautiful and the pages are nice thicker cardstock. The colors are beautiful– I was happy to see that mpix albums are as true-to-color as their prints!
Try to Label Your 365 Image Files As You Go
Take this piece of advice from someone who has failed to do it two years in a row- ha! At the end of the year, when you’re trying to sort and organize 365 images, it is much easier to do so if the files are named: 0101, 0102, 0103, etc. I am sure everyone has a different method to their layouts, but I enjoy having them in a somewhat chronological/seasonal order.
Use Your Album Design Software
If you’re printing your 365 project and you regularly design albums for your clients, use your album design software! While sites like mpix offer consumer templates when uploading your images, it can’t compare to something like AlbumStomp. I was able to upload all my images and customize all 91 pages in a matter of a couple hours.
Vary Your Print Layouts
Professionally designed albums provide a nice variety of interesting layouts as you thumb through. There are pages with lots of pictures mixed with pages that have ample white space. There are pages where one main image spans a full page. When you are working with 365 images, it can be tempting to cram as many as possible onto each spread. Try not to do this! It’s much more visually appealing to mix it up as much as possible.
Display it Where You Can Enjoy it!
Make sure you put it somewhere where you and your family can enjoy thumbing through it. That might be the coffee table, a living room bookshelf, or your bedside table. It may surprise you how meaningful an album full of a whole year of your life becomes!
Great tips, Lyndsay! I’ll be sure to refer to this come next January!!