I was reading Ideas For A “Debt-Free Christmas”: Relatives over at NoCreditNeeded.com and I think they’ve really hit on something with the photo CDs for parents and grandparents. This is a great gift that they’ll really enjoy, and it’s fairly inexpensive.
This year, burn a CD for each set of parents and grandparents with all your digital pictures. Next year, just give them the update (a new CD with your photos from 2007). You can put in some time to really do something special with the presentation of the pictures, but even if you don’t have a lot of time, burn a copy of all your pictures.
My parents often ask for the high-resolution versions of our digital photos, but it’s a real pain to send one or two at a time via e-mail. I never get around to burning a few pictures to CD here, and a few more there. Let each Christmas or holiday season be your chance to give them what they’re looking for.
As an IT guy, backups of important information are always on my mind, if for no other reason than it would be really embarrassing to admit to someone else that a supposed IT professional didn’t take the proper steps to backup and safeguard his information! (My primary motivation, whether you believe me or not, is that I don’t want to lose any irreplaceable data.) If your grandparents live far away, you’ve just created two new off-site backups of your photos. Even if your computer hard drives fail, your external hard drive dies, and your CD and DVD backups melt when your house burns down, there’s a great chance you will be able to get your pictures back.
Quick recap:
- Grandparents get all the photos they could ever want (and probably more)
- You get peace of mind knowing that you’ve got an off-site backup
Question of the day:
How do you backup your digital photos, and are they adequately protected against all kinds of loss?
That’s not a bad idea, but what will they do when you take new pictures of your family? Everything will always be outdated if you just give them a CD.
I recommend Flickr. I’ve been using Flickr for over a year. I convinced all of my friends and family to use it (some were harder to pursuade than others). For Christmas last year, I bought upgraded accounts ($29) for my parents and siblings. I also created a Private “christmas pool”. This workded great because all of my family, published their christmas photos to this pool. It made it really easy to view and/or buy any of the pictures taken by any of my family members.
I currently have over 4,000 picutes on Flickr. All are very high res. My friends and family can go online at any time and check out how big my 15month old son is getting or see what my wife and I have been up to and we can do the same for them.
Try a free account, you’ll see what I mean.
Matt,
That’s a great idea. Flickr also has some terrific tools and you have to love the available API!
I never paid the $29 for an upgraded account because it was always such a pain to upload the pictures one at a time. Recently (this shows how much time I put into researching it) I discovered their uploading tool which makes life much better.
Over the past year+, my free Flicker account has hosted only pictures for eBay listings and ThoughtfulConsideration.com, but at your suggestion, I may have to give the upgraded account a shot.