year review album is in my hands!

 It is hard for me to contain my excitement about this!  988 photos from 2008 in one fabulous 100 page digital StoryBook album!  988 photos saved from cyberspace with stories written beside them. It arrived this week.

2008 was the year that I stopped printing my photos with the digital age --- so that is where I started.  2009 is next.  Then 2010, 2011, 2012.  Now that I have a plan with these amazing predesigned pages,  the task  does not seem overwhelming.

Every time I get an album back I am always amazed at the quality of our Creative Memories albums. WOW.    This time I opted for the LAY FLAT option, and I will never go back.  (Why haven't I always done this?)  The quality of the paper and the colors and the inks is amazing!

There are more details in earlier posts about my favorite Wedding Gallery 12x12 and Photo A Day 12x12 layouts.  The real beauty of the YEAR REVIEW album to me is that this is where our "everyday family life" is captured... I have managed to keep up with getting vacations and weddings and big stuff in digital albums, but it is the precious, everyday, random stuff that eluded me.  Remember that this is not all the photos I took in 2008. That would be 4389 photographs. (Really.)  This is the collection that formed from creating 8 pages per month. This is the plan that made the project do-able to me.

The reason I wigged out when my computer crashed last December was because it was our "everyday ordinary family life" photos that were left hanging in cyberspace.  I am all about capturing 'perfectly ordinary' for images we almost forget to snap... I want to remember silliness at a family dinner or when Mike dressed in the girls clothes after folding too much of their laundry... I want to remember when Kiley drove the car into the house... and when the ducks started pooping on the porch... I want the quiet, tender moments of my daddy's hospital days as much as vacations and weddings.  A Year In Review album helps capture the gift of all those perfectly ordinary days that make a year... and life.

My quest will be to show this album to as many people as I can... to inspire them to retrieve their precious memories from the computer.  Remember the thought provoking saying "Memory Keeping begins with the printed photo..." This is the essence of it. Images on a computer are at risk - both to computer crashes and to changing technology. The best way to preserve an image is to have something that you can hold in your hands.

Want to take a peek at this album all done?

Karen's 2008 Year in Review Album

Want to make your own version?