Best Western's Travel Blog - You Must Be Trippin' - Fun Ways to Capture Your Summer Memories

Fun Ways to Capture Your Summer Memories

August 27 2010 by Julie Drossos

The summer months are often full of great memories - pool parties, summer hikes, fun on the water (we all want to capture our first time up on a wakeboard!), beach sports and celebratory BBQs to name a few. Back in the day, the only option we had to share our memories was to develop photos and spend hours placing them in albums (Really...how annoying were those clear plastic adhesive pages. I could never get the air bubbles out of them!).

Today, there are a number of quick, easy and fun ways to share our best summer moments. These options are all relatively seamless to put together and very simple and enjoyable for the "viewer".

Facebook

Aaaah Facebook. Good 'ole Facebook. Who isn't on Facebook these days? Seriously. I got a friend request from my friend's grandmother last week! Truth be told, I think it is very cool how saturated our world has become with Facebook. Facebook is one of the easiest ways to share your memories (with those whom you want to share them with). You can upload photos or videos, and you can use the privacy controls to manage who on your friends lists gets to see your albums. This comes in handy when you don't want some of your connections to be made aware of the end-of-summer bbq you hosted that they were not invited to :-) The other thing about Facebook albums that you may not have known about is that you can share your albums with friends that don't even have their own Facebook account (who knew?!). If you open one of your photo albums and scroll to the very bottom, you'll see Share this album with anyone by sending them this public link.

Photo Sites

Over the past several years, fueled by the popularity of digital cameras and the social media boom, it seems like every time you get online there's some new photo sharing website. Yes, photo sharing websites are a dime a dozen now, and it can be confusing (and irritating) to decide which is the best one to use without ending up with 9 new "accounts" with 9 different user names along with hyper-confusing password combinations to remember. With the number of Photo sharing websites there are floating around there, there are obviously going to be pros and cons to all of them. From Picasa to SmugMug to Kodak Gallery to Snapfish, you can find the good, the bad and the ugly in every experience. From talking to photography aficionados of all levels of skill, passion and experience, the general consensus seems to be that Flickr is all around a good bet. Flickr is about as user-friendly and appealing to the masses as it gets. It's free (all you need to do is sign up for a Yahoo! account) or only $24.95 per year for unlimited storage and an advertising-free experience. For basic photo sharing for the "average joe", it's just what you need. However, note that the free version of Flickr compresses your images when you upload them, which definitely takes away from photo quality. You also won't be able to download from your Flickr account unless you upgrade to the Pro version. In my opinion if you're a moderately experienced photographer or plan to get into photography as a hobby, it's definitely a great deal to invest your $24.95 in the pro version. This means your friends can also download from your Flickr site.. after all, sharing your memories is what it's all about, isn't it?!

Photo Books

Getting back to those evil clear adhesive pages in those old photo albums. No more! I absolutely love the trend towards making photo books, and they're a great way to capture your memories if you're looking for something more tangible. I first saw these being done for weddings, but now, thanks to the ease of creating and ordering them as well as their affordability, people are making photo books for baby announcements, birthday gifts, anniversaries, memoirs of group road trips, or just for fun!

Now, like photo sites but not quite to the same degree, there are a LOT of photo book creation websites. I would say my #1 suggestion would be Shutterfly, primarily for its expansive sizing, binding and design options. The quality is great, and you can use one of their templates (lots to choose from and some great designs) or really make your book "your own" by designing your own template.

Next runner up in my books would be Kodak Gallery books. I will say that Kodak Gallery has fewer sizing and binding options and the quality is slightly less (in my opinion) to Shutterfly, however I find that the "Kodak name" provides for a high level of overall customer satisfaction and great return, reprint and refund policies. Pricing for Kodak Gallery and Shutterfly is pretty comparable, averaging around $35 for a 20 page 8.5x11 book.

Online Slideshows

The only thing better than special moments or big life events captured with images, is putting those images to music! We've all seen how photo montages set to music can really bring you back and strike an emotional chord deep inside. Think you need to hire a pro to do one of these for you?! Think again! One of the simplest programs that seems to be found on most PCs is Windows Movie Maker. Or on the Mac you would use iMovie. All you have to do is drag and drop your images, select your timing, then play with the effects for the images and drop in your music and bam! Not only is putting together your montage fun, but a child could literally do this. No instructions needed. After you're done, save your movie file, and you can share it with your friends using Facebook video, You Tube, Flickr or Vimeo.

Have fun!

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