Documenting Life During the Pandemic

3 Simple Ways to Start

Ok— so it’s been A MINUTE since we last connected!

2020 happened and we had another baby!

Just like that… life seemed to get crazier and yet more still at the same time! Having a baby during the pandemic is a story in its own right. Adding a second child to the mix two weeks after the world shut down and life as we knew it changed, is a whole other story! How we’ve somehow managed to make it through? Yet another one. Challenges, added anxieties, and magical silver linings fill our daily lives. So many incredible stories to share, but seemingly still no time to document.

However, I have found a few super helpful and simple ways to make documenting life during this momentous time in our history possible. It comes back to finding creative ways to push “pause,” capture some notes about what we're experiencing, and creating a system that makes it easy to pull together something later.

I imagine your family and life dynamic has changed a ton this year too! How cool would it be to be able to share details of what daily life looked like back in the great global pandemic of 2020? Don’t let time and not having a plan get in the way. Get started today using the following tips!

|| Push Pause ||

1 || Use Your Camera Phone to Take Photo and Video Clips

Inventory what is new in your life right now. Create a master list (either in your head) or use the notes app on your phone. Then set out to document short video clips and photos of your life lately.

Here are a few ideas:

• Work From Home Setup

• Wearing Masks

• What your outings look like

• Grocery shopping in 2020

• Amazon Box pile

• Rando House Projects

• Pandemic Gardening

• Pandemic Playgrounds (in your yard)

• Daily Walk Route

• Things about every day life you don’t want to forget

• Socially Distant Hangout Setups

|| Take Notes ||

2 || Journaling

Give yourself some time to quickly document what is happening in your world right now. I make a habit of going through my camera roll nightly (or weekly) to highlight my favorite images and delete the rest. Every so often, I will select an image and email it to myself, a friend or family member, with a few notes about what is happening in the image/our life lately.

I recently gifted myself the most gorgeous 3 year gratitude journal: The Flecks of Gold journal by 3in30 Takeaways for Moms. It has space for writing a few lines to describe your “Flecks of Gold” moments each day — those tiny moments that bring you joy and light up your soul.

If you don’t feel like you have time for handwriting, try using your phone again and instead of mindlessly scrolling social media, try creating a new note or word document to type down a quick list of things that are new and different in your life.

Here are a few prompts to consider:

• Silver linings from the pandemic

• How life looked in Feb 2020 v. today

• Did you have summer plans or vacation plans that were altered? What did you do instead?

• Have you done any new projects at home that you wouldn’t have done but for this pandemic quarantine?

• What has been the biggest challenge during the pandemic?

• What did you do during quarantine?

• Pandemic Bingo… have you heard of it? It’s basically a sarcastic way to tally up how you’ve been affected by the COVID19 Pandemic. A few common squares that come to mind:

  • WFH (Work From Home)

  • Joined TikTok

  • Stock piled Toilet Paper (or ran out!)

  • Learned to cook

  • Haven’t worn jeans in 6 months (or is that just me?)

  • Grew a garden

  • Aggressively increased your Amazon Bill

  • Learned to sew (masks)

  • Social Distance Expert

  • Had a quarantini

• Have you been tested for the Coronavirus? What was that experience like?

• Did you or anyone you know contract COVID19?

• Things you hope stick around when this virus hopefully ends.

• Things you miss about life pre-pandemic

|| Create a System ||

3 || Easy Ways to Save Memories

Tinybeans

My favorite system for memory keeping in this time of documenting vs. making final products has been to use Tinybeans as a way to make notes on my favorite images and share them with my family in a daily journal.

The Tinybeans App has made it incredibly easy to capture the moments and share the stories behind them. It has also provided me with an organized and searchable way to review, print, and compile stories in albums later.

This year, I plan to make a yearbook album using Pinhole Press. I’ll be utilizing the search function in Tinybeans to compile a story that is complete with the mega moments I don’t want to forget from 2020. When creating posts in Tinybeans, I’ve been sure to include keywords for 2020 that I’ll use to search in my photo descriptions later (i.e. masks, social distancing, silver linings, milestones, pandemic.)

Instagram

I still love using Instagram as a way of sharing impactful moments with my followers and it helps to create a “highlight” reel of the mega moments that I am experiencing.

As an efficient way to create tangible products with your memories - you can connect Chatbooks to your Instagram Account to automatically print a photo book with your images and captions every 60 pages.

I am also using Chatbooks to connect to Tinybeans to create larger soft cover books that hold up to 366 images/caption pages to print off more of my favorite every day moments from Tinybeans. The two apps connect now — making it super easy to create a book!

Notes App

I feel like I’ve said it repeatedly, but the Notes App on my phone has become my virtual best friend. I have organized it with several different folders so that I can quickly add notes and images and even video clips to it with stories that I don’t want to forget, but don’t have time to sit down and compile at that given moment.

Examples of folders I have:

• Shit my kids say

• Milestone Moments

• Pushing Pause

• Favorite Recipes

• Shopping Lists

• Don’t forget to do

(1SE) One Second Every Day App

I have been making it a habit to take short 5-10s video clips horizontally filmed using my iPhone on a daily (or at a min. weekly basis). I try to capture the time, place, moment and feel for what is happening in life on that given day so that when I go and compile my video story, there is ample content. I wish I could say that I keep up with making monthly videos every month… but I don’t. I do however regularly try to make sure to film so that one day I can. Luckily the 1SE app makes it super easy to make fun films using your photo and video content whenever you’re ready!

Ok - that’s it for today! Hope this gives you some motivation and a few ways to just get started today! Comment below and let me know what you plan to document! I’d love to hear it!

What's Your Backup Plan?

What happens when Facebook, Instagram and website hosting crashes all in the same day? In most cases panic and hysteria! I mean after all, we live in a digital world and for most of us, our most precious and most recent memories are saved somewhere online or in the cloud. I have a system I use so that when things go awry I am not left in a panic. Today on the blog, I am sharing my backup plan with you!

Let’s Dive in!

I use my iPhone to take 80% of my daily photos. The other 20% are taken using my Canon 5DMkIII. Here’s a breakdown of the process I use to make sure everything is backed up in multiple places and hopefully safe and accessible in the future.

PHONE BACKUP SYSTEM

Google Photos not iCloud

After doing some research into my options, I chose to use Google Photos as my photo backup source on my iPhone. I was frustrated that my iCloud was constantly filling up and my hard drive was always full on my computer. I honestly never understood the whole iCloud business because it felt like there was never any way to actually view, manage and use the photos sent there. It is my understanding that the iCloud is really just a means of syncing and sharing your files across several apple products (i.e. iPhone, iPad, computer) and is not something you should rely upon as a main backup source.

I downloaded the Google Photos App on my phone and set it up using autosync to backup all of my photos on my phone. Here’s how to do it!  It may take a few hours (or in my case) days to get caught up initially, but every day now, my photos are backed up automatically.

If you are an Amazon Prime member or have a significant number of larger sized image files and videos - you can consider Amazon Photos for your backup source. I haven’t made the switch yet, but here is an article I found helpful when researching my options.

For more info on How I Organize and Manage Digital Files check out this blog post I wrote where I cover all the details!

IFTT

I have signed up to IFTTT (If This Then That), an online service where you can set up formulas for backing up your content. I use it to backup my Instagram posts and favorite hashtags I follow. These photos are automatically sent to a special folder I have on Dropbox.  

Chatbooks

I use Chatbooks to print my cell phone photos. I have set up a folder in my camera roll called Favorites. Using this folder, I connected it to a subscription with Chatbooks to automatically print a hardcover photo book every 60 images with my favorite images from my phone.

I take thousands of pictures a year, so these books get sent to print often. Chatbooks gives you a 3 day grace period to go into the app and select which of those favorites in your favorites album you want to print in the final book. It takes just a few minutes a week and I have an incredible backup catalogue of my favorite cell phone pics.

One other perk is you can create a schedule for your subscription so that you get 1 book / month or any other frequency you wish. I recently took advantage of their 40% off sale and caught up and printed 25 of my latest books. Their customer service is top notch, so if you have any questions or issues, always reach out to them to solve it! They can even pause your account for a bit while you get organized. You can also select to add up to 5 bonus prints (5x5” square prints) to your order if you’d like! I use these to add to my daughter’s baby book.

It feels so incredible to know these moments are saved not just in the digital world anymore. When I have time, I plan to handwrite captions in my printed Chatbooks so that my future generations can experience my world through my view.  If handwriting isn’t your thing, you have the option to type captions or print full page photos instead.

I also have a separate subscription setup to print my Instagram posts every 60 posts with the captions included from each post. This is a great way to make sure that Instagram is backed up as well. I will share a later post more about all of the greatness about Chatbooks, but if you want to know more now, check them out here! Using my link you can get $10 off your first book.

Tinybeans

I have a Lifetime Premium Subscription to Tinybeans, because I am basically obsessed with this family photo sharing app. I try to load my photos, videos and stories daily but sometimes do bulk catch ups for a few weeks at a time when things get crazy.  Using this app, my family and closest friends are signed up to receive updates when I post. On their phone or computer, they can log into Tinybeans and can view, comment and love on all of the memories we are creating.

My family is spread across the country and this app has allowed us to have an incredible relationship where they literally watch our daughter grow and experience the world daily, without me having to blast all of our private moments on Facebook or Instagram. I can’t scream from the rooftops loud enough about how much I love Tinybeans. Using my affiliate link, you can try Tinybeans Premium for 1 month free. I swear you’ll fall in love!

My favorite moments from my cell phone are all backed up here when I load them to the app. I could also load my “real camera” photos and videos from my desktop if I wanted to, but rarely do. Since this post is all about backing up - I try, at a minimum, to catch up and download an actual backup of all of my Tinybeans memories annually.

The backup exports as a .zip file organized monthly with the video and photo files and a separate export of all of the captions and family comments. The backup also sends a .html file with an interactive calendar view of my tinybeans account by month. You can click on each day individually and see the full day of memories as they looked on the App as well.

In the future, I’ll share more about the great features of Tinybeans specifically, but I am always happy to chat more about this wonderful product - so comment below if you’ve got any questions!  

CAMERA BACKUP

I am a professional photographer by day / mama taking an excessive amount of photos of my life by “all other moments of the day.”  I use my “real camera” to capture higher quality images and video clips that I ideally print annually in a yearbook and use to create annual family video reels. I have only done a few albums and videos, but hope to catch up “when I have more time.” So having a backup system is critical to ensuring the memories are there when I need them!

Memory Card

I use a Canon 5dMkIII to capture my photographs. This camera has a dual card reader that allows you to record your footage to 2 memory cards at the same time. I always do this as an instant backup to taking photos. I use SanDisk Extreme Pro Memory Cards (both CF and SD.) I have dozens of memory cards so that I can keep original images on the cards until I have backed up the final favorite keeper images on multiple sources.

External Hard Drives

I try to load my memory card photos to an external hard drive as soon as possible after shooting - usually at night after the baby has gone to bed. I am obsessed with the Lacie Rugged 4TB External Hard drives. I use these drives every single day. They serve as my “main” external hard drive for active files and then I have extra ones for backup purposes.  

For more about how I organize and use my images - check out my blog post here. Once my photos are edited and the favorite final images are exported, I will delete the images off my memory cards.

Dropbox & Online Galleries

I use Dropbox as my cloud based storage for my digital files and favorite photos. I have upgraded to a premium business account to have over 1TB of memory access. I am in the habit of sharing my “best of” personal photos to a folder I have created organized by year on Dropbox.

I also try to load all of my favorite images to an online gallery I have created for my family. I use Pixieset to deliver my professional photos to clients, and set up a gallery for our family to use as well. All of my “real camera” favorite photos are backed up here a few times a year.

Printing

The best back up to digital photos is hard copy prints. I try to print all of my favorite photos at the end of the year. I use Costco to load hundreds of photos and have them shipped to my house at the end of the year. In an ideal world, these photos get put into an album with sleeves and room for captions. I am very behind on this task right now.

I also try to print an annual press printed photo album with my favorite “best of” photos every year. I am a busy mama raising a 2 year old daughter and have only just made our first album through Blurb. I hope to catch up for previous years and vacations as time allows. But for now these images are all backed up and organized and are waiting for when I am ready.

Video

When I was writing this blog post, I basically inventoried my whole process and system for backing up my life. In doing so, I realized I haven’t created a backup of my video files captured on my “real camera.” Only my cell phone videos are backed up (on google photos and Tinybeans.) That freaked me right out because I have some incredible moments captured that I would be devastated to lose.

Luckily, it took just a few minutes to back these files up. For all of my video files, I put them in one folder annually. Inside that folder, I create separate folders by date of capture with a description of what we did in those videos. It was as simple as moving a copy of the Movies folder over to a new external backup drive that I purchased for 2019. Phew. That’s done!

PROFESSIONAL PHOTOS & MISC. SOURCES

If you have ever had your photos taken by a professional photographer or have received a link to download your photos from someone (i.e. school portraits, wedding photos, annual christmas card photos etc.), we need to talk!

Have you downloaded these photos from the link you got? Have you printed the photos? Do you know the password to get in? Can you access these files quickly if you want to?

I am only asking this because, yes I am a pro photographer who sends dozens of links to such galleries each year to my clients, but I am also a consumer. I have wedding photos and family photos sent to us from photographer’s we have hired to document precious moments of our lives.

I recently made my wedding album (5 years later.) I have my images from the wedding downloaded in several places and also backed up online through the Online Pass Gallery shared with me from our photographer. When I went to access my wedding images, I realized that the hard drives I have my photos backed up on use a USB or Thunderbolt connection. My new computer doesn’t have a port for either USB or Thunderbolt. It doesn’t even have a CD drive. This was ok, I thought, because my photos were backed up online in the cloud Pass Gallery.

I learned quickly, that although my photos were viewable online in the cloud Pass Gallery, I couldn’t quickly download the high res files. Since more than 1 year had elapsed since our initial gallery was created, these files were sent to “deep storage.” It took more than 12 hours to get the final link to download the files I selected. Luckily they were still available, but this seriously hindered my ability to just sit down and start making my album.

This leads me to my final Back Up suggestion:

Create an Annual System to Update Technology

Technology is literally changing every day. CD’s, USB’s, Thunderbolts, are all a “thing” of the past. It is important to make sure that you assess your arsenal of memories and create a system of backing up your back up every year using the newest technology. Also, try to remind yourself not to throw out all of the accessories to your old backups (i.e. cord connections and hardware.)

Luckily, you can get just about anything online now a days, so if you find yourself in a jam without a cord to connect your old external hard drive, search google for the cord you need or dongle adapter that will help you convert your old cord to the newer technology.

This was another huge post! Thanks for sticking through it to the end. If you haven’t yet - be sure to download your FREE Backup Plan Worksheet!

Quick Tips to Manage Digital Photos and Make Albums Quickly

This month, I am tackling some MAJOR projects on my dream list:

• Photo Album documenting our journey from Boston to the Burbs: (the last 2 years of life documented by our Family Photographer, Karen Kelly.)

• Our Wedding Album - It’s been 5 years!

• A gift for Me: Updating and re-printing a photo album documenting my motherhood journey and comparing it with my mom’s journey with me; and

• Our Family Yearbook from 2018 (and then 2017 - because I haven’t done that either)

I am a busy mama and I have had to come up with some systems to make organizing and tackling these photo projects simple, doable and fun.

Creating my to do list photo projects has never been easier since creating our Private Facebook Community where we provide each other accountability, support and inspiration as we tackle our dream photo projects. We’ve got a crew of great people already getting started as we speak and would LOVE to have you along to help support you through your journey as well! !

This is a hefty blog post with tons of tips and tricks for managing your digital image collections and to help making photo projects easy! Grab a cup of coffee or glass of wine and let’s jump in to it!

COMPUTER BASED TIPS:

If you’re a visual learner, I have created a series of quick tutorial videos you can binge watch. These videos will show you what I am talking about below.

Organize Digital Photos in Folders by Year, then Month

This simple step allows you to quickly start identifying your universe of photos for photo projects. Within each month you can add separate folders for key events (i.e. birthdays, milestones or special events) but for simplicity sake a folder for year and then month is good enough to get you already so much more organized! Below is a quick 2 minute video of what I am talking about!

Make a “Best Of” Folder for the Most Favorites for the Year.

Within your Annual Folder, create a separate “Best Of” Folder. In this folder, anytime you take a picture and you instantly know it’s an iconic image that you will remember for all time or it becomes your favorite photo, throw it in here. You can separate this “Best of” Folder by month as well to stay even more organized. Being picky about selecting favorites will help you have fewer photos in the universe to consider at the end of the year.

Schedule 10 Minutes Each Month To Pick and Save Your Favorites

At the end of each month, go through your photos and pick your most favorites from each month to include in the “Best Of” folder. Some months will be more monumental and might have more moments than others (and that’s ok!) But as a general rule, I try to get myself to pick only the top 5-10. And yes… some months I have 50! But it’s still way less than 1,000’s at the end of the year, so I consider that a win!

Use Descriptive Filenames for Saving Photos [On a Computer]

You can customize filenames in many different ways on your computer: At import, export, or by renaming the files. Start file names with the date the photo was taken so that you can easily sort chronologically. Here are a few examples of good descriptive filenames:

• 2019_01_07_willas_2nd_birthday

• 2019_05_charleston_vacation

• 2019_christmas

• 2019_07_19_willa_tougas_farm

Using descriptive file names will help you search your files at a later date. You can also select to have the filename printed on the back of your photos with some companies simply by checking a box at checkout. Then you have an automatic date stamp and quick description on your printed photos without having to take an additional step.

Get Started with Catching Up for This Year First

Currently, it’s February. It’s a perfect time to have some content to get started with to create a system for making finding your favorite images from this year super simple and quick at the end of the year. If you’re reading this later in the year -- don’t worry! It is never too late to start this process! By setting up a file organizing structure for the current year, you will hone the skill for repeating it to address previous years and will be ready to rock and roll next year!

Taking the time now to create a system will help you get caught up so that each month you can take just 5-10 minutes to select your favorites from the month and move forward. At the end of the year, you will have a folder with just your top favorites and you will be able to make your Annual Photo album in no time at all! Ahh, doesn’t that already fill your lungs with air?

Once you’re caught up, you can go back and start organizing old photos.

Organize Older Photos Starting Chronologically from Last Year

Set realistic goals and tackle just one year at a time starting with the most recent. Use the same system, except it will be quickest and easiest to limit your folder breakdown to just the year (i.e. 2018 photos / 2017 photos etc.) Here is a link to a video I created to show you how I use Adobe Bridge to view, sort, and select my favorite photos each year.

Gather all your photos from your hard drives, cloud, or desktop and put them all in one place in a new folder that you have created for that year. Once you are certain they are all in that folder, I recommend creating a backup of this annual folder (on either an external hard drive or another cloud based service).  This is my favorite go to brand for external hard drives. I get a new one each year for my photo storage and backup.

You should also consider loading your annual folder to Google Photos or Dropbox or some other cloud based service like Amazon Cloud. Check into the paid subscriptions to allow for more storage space and higher resolution backup options. Backing up to multiple sources helps ensure your images are safe from disaster. I recommend having at least 1 full backup of your digital files before you start deleting and moving too many things around.

Once your images are backed up, create a “Best Of” folder on your hard drive. I suggest downloading Adobe Bridge - it is a software that is offered for free through Adobe Creative Cloud and is a great tool to use for quickly viewing, selecting and updating file info (including renaming files) of your favorite images from a bulk collection. Above is a link to a video I have created that shows my quick and easy method for selecting favorites, copying them to my hard drive, and bulk renaming files to ensure that they appear chronologically. This makes making an album super easy later.

ON A SMARTPHONE

Organizing Phone Photos:

If you’re anything like me, you’ve got 10x more cell phone photos than fancy camera photos. I bet most of your favorites images are even taken on your phone! Here are some helpful tips for organizing and backing up your smartphone photos and videos.

Cloud based backup

If you’re not already signed up for a cloud based service like Google Photos, Dropbox or Amazon Cloud, I highly suggest signing up for one (or all of these) services to help back up, store and organize your photos. These services each work on your computer and also have an app that you can download to use on your phone. There are paid upgrades you can purchase for more storage and higher resolution backup offerings that I would also highly recommend. If you have thousands of photos, this backup could take several days, so be patient as it loads in the background. Also make sure you’re logged into your wifi to help save cellular data!

Another super cool service to look into is called IFTT - it is a free platform that helps you connect and link your apps and devices for creative backup strategies. I use it to link my Instagram and Facebook posts to automatically be backed up to Dropbox. You can also select certain hashtags to follow that can be automatically backed up to Dropbox as well. I used this service to follow my wedding hashtag so all of my friends’ posts ended up in one place and I was sure to see them! There are tons more options available so when you have time to jump down that fun rabbit hole, check it out!

Utilize the “favorites” button to select your favorite photos each day (and delete the rest!)

On the iphone, you can select (“heart”) your favorite images. On an android phone or in google photos, you use the “star” button. When you add a heart or a star to the image, that image is automatically flagged and stored in a “favorites” default album on your phone. You can find this by clicking on the album view within your photos app.

When you view your camera roll in a grid view, you will see the heart or star symbol on your favorite photos. I use this as a guide for bulk deleting excess images that are my outtakes and save photo storage room on my phone. You can do so by clicking the select button, then selecting all of the images and movies that don’t have the heart symbol and then click the trash can to delete them.

In an ideal world, I do this daily at night after my daughter goes to bed and I inevitably end up going through the photos from the day to see her sweet face. It’s a great exercise to do at a minimum weekly though so that you don’t get too backed up.  

Create Best Of Album

On your phone in the camera uploads app, and in each of these cloud based services, you can create albums for your photos. Your photos will automatically be stored chronologically on your phone.

You can create albums to help organize your photos by event or by year. I suggest creating a “Best Of” folder on your phone and on the cloud based service for your all time favorite photos from the year for printing in photobooks.. Set it up by year (i.e. 2019 Best of) and put only your absolute most favorites in this folder.

Search photos

Your camera app, Google Photos and I believe Amazon Cloud all have built in face recognition and geolocation tagging and search functions now. You can click on a person’s face and create a name for that person. Then, later, you can type that person’s name in and search photos of only that person. I have tested out this search function using google photos and found that you can even find photos of things if you describe them! It was creepy for sure, but also super helpful! When you search photos, you can then create new albums for certain events or of certain people so that your photos are organized even further.

Print Photos Using Apps
Many printing companies have apps that will allow you to create photo books using your phone photos. They can also access your google photos, dropbox and often Amazon Cloud accounts to pull images. If you have created albums on your phone, you can elect to create books from just those albums.

I made a google photo book of my parents with my daughter for Christmas in less than 15 minutes just by simply using the Google Photos app and selecting the folder of images I created from a search of photos with my mom and stepdad in them. The book was super easy to make and cost $30!  I highly recommend this if you’re looking for a quick and easy way to print and share your favorite cell phone photos.

Use Chatbooks for super cute decent quality for low cost photo books using cell phone shots. You can subscribe and set up for it to create photo books every 60 photos from a folder on your phone or google photos. I set mine up using my favorites folder on my phone.

MAKING THE ALBUM

I suggest spending just 30 minutes going through your options for album companies, picking one and sticking with it. Import your “best of” folder and start making your album. Your images should now be ordered chronologically and all of your favorites should already be selected. So the making of the album shouldn’t take you long. You’ll simply be dragging and dropping your favorite images into the template of your choice and then within a few minutes (or hours if you’re picky) your project will be complete!

This has been one humungous blog post and I know that there’s a ton to digest. I am always happy to answer questions in the comments or can be reached by email at frameoflifeproject@gmail.com. Better yet, let’s connect on Instagram or Facebook!