Milk and Cookies
with Kristen
I'm a mother of five, a bargain hunter, a recreational comparison shopper, and always trying to make more time - for me and for you, too. On this blog I'm sharing my favorite tools and finds to help make your work-life juggle a bit easier.
You can find my personal blog at Swistle.blogspot.com.
Quick and easy ways to display family photos
Categories: House & Home, Toothsome products (for grownups)
Since acquiring a halfway decent digital camera, I’ve added thousands and thousands of photos to my image library—some awful, some just okay, and a few that I think are really great. Most of the time I upload the photos I most want to share/look at again/archive in some meaningful way to Flickr, but I find that between a shortage of time and an overload of images, I rarely get around to displaying my favorites around my home.
This is something I wish I did more often, because I love personal photography used as home decoration. For some reason, I always think it’s going to be such a major undertaking to get things picked out and printed and displayed in the appropriate location, I start picturing Exacto blades and laser levelers and jammed printers and arrrrgh. I mean, I like the way scrapbooks look, but just thinking about the effort that goes into them makes me kind of sweaty.
We’re slowly finishing up a remodel that has added two extra rooms to our house, so I’ve been thinking of ways I could put up some photos that won’t 1) suck up an entire weekend, 2) be too rigid to allow me to switch in new photos (children are always growing, have you noticed this?), or 3) cost a hojilliion dollars. Here’s a few options I’ve been looking at:
DIY Photo Wire Display. Okay, admittedly this does look like it would take some time to put together, but the end result is so cool! The assembly process seems like something I could totally outsource to my husband, leaving me with the relatively fun option of choosing the photos I want to display.
Studio Wall Easel. I love this bracketed hanging frame whatsit from Pottery Barn, it’s a great no-brainer way to get your photos hung at appealing angles and distances without doing a bunch of measuring and arranging and arrgh. (For those who don’t mind such activities, check out Dooce’s photo-hanging primer, which involves—oh god—a preliminary diagram and wax paper template.)
Shelf Display Of Some Kind. I like the ease of propping framed photos on a basic shelf or two, and I also like the way this four-level shelf system is set up. I could see doing some kind of photo theme, or just putting up a combo of family photos and random landscapes.
For non-wall-oriented stuff, I love the quality of the books Shutterfly produces, and I’m a huge fan of the Moo MiniCards (I have a bunch of these on my fridge and my work desk at the moment).
What about you—how do you display family photos around your house or office?
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I have the same problem. The only thing I do is try to upload pics on he first of every month to Shutterfly. My husband made my daughter a nice book last year from Shutterfly for Christmas. Other than organizing the photos by month, I haven’t done a darn thing with them for two years. And don’t get me started on her baby book - I suck.
Kate | October 9th, 2007 at 6:37 am
I like the second one best out of those…
Our photos are displayed haphazardly in frames
I liked something you did with photos though that I remember from an old post…was it the fridge magnets? Or something? Whatever it was, I thought that looked great.
Jem | October 9th, 2007 at 6:40 am
I got a bunch of inexpensive matching frames and decorated one of the hardest places to decorate - the downstairs bathroom. Photos everywhere, and the best ones! Our wedding, the birth day of each child being held by each grand parent, etc. The frames all match which automatically looks good. It also gives people who don’t visit often/stay long to see what’s been going on b/c they almost always visit the bathroom! Shutterfly is great for prints and books and calendars and such. It usually takes a couple of hours to organize whatever I’m trying to organize but so worth it! Oh, and I skip scrapbooking and go straight to a cute shutterfly album every few months. Easy, painless and worth the $30!
Mandy | October 9th, 2007 at 12:12 pm
I’m still not caught up on this, but I’ll tell you what my mom does with the photos I give her. She has, like, a DOZEN flexible magnetic 4×6 photo pockets on her fridge, and she puts the new pics in there, leaving old favorites in. It’s surprisingly nice-looking—possibly because she is someone who doesn’t weigh down the front of her fridge with ALL THE PAPER IN THE HOUSE like I do.
Swistle | October 9th, 2007 at 1:00 pm
I like the DIY photo wire display but we have cats in this house and a 17-month-old who will want to pull that down. My fave is the studio wall easel because it looks easy to clean. Any shelf in this house would collect so much dust, it would turn our photos B&W.
hello insomnia | October 9th, 2007 at 1:15 pm
We have a table full of framed photos, and then we have a few unframed snapshots on the fridge. We also finally sucked it up and found some 13×19 frames online and hung some of my slightly more artistic photos around the apartment. We don’t have anything as cool as the stuff you talked about in this post, though.
Jess | October 9th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
My suggestion, because I am lazy, would be to purchase a few of those digital photo frames and periodically upload the images. They’re kinda expensive, unfortunately. Otherwise, I’d probably buy some cheap frames at Dollar General (I can’t remember if you have those up there, but they probably have some at Wal-Mart or Cosco) that all matched, start kind of sparse on a wall, and then add to it as the mood strikes.
Truth be told, if I actually wanted to do something vaguely artistic, I would invite my mom to come visit, because I fail at arts and crafts and decorating…
GoingLoopy | October 9th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
I like the second and third one quite a bit. I recently got married and have been looking for a way to display tons of pictures with little effort. Right now I have a random shadow box and framed picture here and there. Nothing original.
Jennie | October 9th, 2007 at 3:10 pm
Great post, these are some really inspiring ideas! Currently I just have my fridge cram packed with photos that I added magnetic tape to, and of course a few framed pictures hanging on the walls.. but I would like to do something similar to the first idea.
Sabine | October 9th, 2007 at 3:48 pm
What a timely post! We’ve been just thinking about our photos and that we barely print them anymore. I’d love to display them in some organized manner but everything i’ve explored so far is really time consuming… Some of these suggestions are great - need to look into it!
victoria | October 9th, 2007 at 10:22 pm
If I had the money, I love this site
http://www.thepicturewallcompany.com
So awesome!
Janet | October 10th, 2007 at 4:30 am
Use Firefox as your browser and add the extension FotoFox. When you open the extension a window opens on the left of the screen and automatically logs you into your Flickr account. You just dump your photos into that (last night I dumped in 92 at the same time) and it processes them and uploads them. It’s much easier to use than the other Flickr uploaders I have tried.
I don’t put photos up in my house. My husband is an extreme minimalist (he’s an architect) so our walls bare and white. Now that I am digitalized, I never think to print things out.
KatieK | October 10th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
I bought this:
http://www.creativememories.com/MainMenu/Our-products-and-services/FramingHome/Everyday-Display-in-black
to display 4×6 prints that I can easily rotate. It is a framed magnetic board. The board is around 12×12″ and is covered in linen with a frame in a dark brown (aged bronze maybe?) finish. It has magnetic disks that match the frame to attach pictures or whatever you want . I can periodically change out the pictures easily since it only involves removing magnets and replacing the prints.
Buckeye Mommy | October 10th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
That perfect picture wall is just about the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. Thanks Janet!
Sandy | October 10th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
Janet: I love that perfect picture wall SO MUCH! So glad you shared that link. : )
KatieK: thanks for the tip! I use Flickr Uploadr, which is handy but can be a little slow at times.
milkandcookies | October 10th, 2007 at 6:06 pm
When I realized that I had 46 picture frames on the walls and tabletops, I knew something had to change. So I went out and bought a big wireless digital picture frame.
A wireless digital picture frame is the way to go; you can display ALL of the pictures that are stored in your hard drive, your memory cards, and your flash drives, and see them slide-showing across the frame all the time! Most wireless or plain digital frames have Mp3 players in them, too. Pictures I hadn’t seen in years now play across my living room wall; it’s wonderful. My kids at all stages and phases of their lives, my parents, my cats, our vacations. . . .all right there.
You can even buy a Whirlpool refrigerator with wireless connections now.
Think of all the wall and counter and table space you’ll have, with all your photos in one classy frame. They come in all sizes, too, and if you consider the price of dozens of regular frames, the price of a wireless frame is a bargain!
http://www.wirelesspictureframe.com/
Mamacita | October 11th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
http://www.kodak.com/eknec/PageQuerier.jhtml?pq-path=11826&CID=KOSEMAIL&MSG=092107_N1_D_CDWALL&pq-locale=en_US&_requestid=5463
looks super cool. not too pricey but i dont know how much effort it would require. i think ikea has some cool ones as well that of course i couldnt find online!
jen | October 17th, 2007 at 10:03 pm
I am a photo addict. I have the flexible frames on the big freezer in the pantry. I have seperate albums for each of the 3 kids with just 8×10’s (chronological order and I add to it periodically). I have one wall that has a GIANT empty frame that frames our family tree kind of photos (vintage that I have cleaned up in photoshop mostly).
There is one long hallway wall that is collage frames. I now just make my own from yard sale frames and digital photos. Some of the collages have a theme (ex: pics of son#1 sleeping from a few months old to about 8 yrs or pics of son #2 and other folks- mom, dad, etc)
There is one wall I call my wall of twos. I noticed that I seem to like to take photos of duos so I ran with that.
None of my frames match (yardsale and thriftstore finds).
And in the dining room I have a row of 8×10’s of the kids at about the same ages. It’s fun to play “guess who is who?” with friends and family since my kids all look alike (hint: the girl has earrings).
I did see this: http://www.anh-minh.com/plexiphoto.htm Looks great! And not too hard to do.
But my fave photo is above the fireplace. I took an idea from Geniveve on Trading Spaces years and years ago. I turn a digital photo black & white, zoom in a little tight and send it to my copy center to print on regular paper at the poster size. 2 bucks! Mat and frame it and it is a work of art. I change it out about once a year.
Deanna | October 18th, 2007 at 1:30 pm