This post is sponsored by Shutterfly, Inc. in partnership with Resourceful Mom Media.
I have been working a long time on my storytelling through photos. It has been an evolution as I master my camera and work on capturing more authentic moments in our life. I go through stages where I rely completely on my DSLR and then periods in our life where I want the swiftness of a quicker capture with my photos. I am a fantastic giver of moments on Facebook and Instagram. What I am terrible at though is organizing, sorting, and actually printing our precious moments.
I got the opportunity to test drive an amazing photo service called ThisLife by Shutterfly that I know you all are going to be nuts about it because it helps us be a better family historian gathering all of your life moments, organizing, and sorting them all into one spot. I want to share my experience with you and how I brought our Grand Rapids holiday to life.
Our family took an amazing holiday trip this year to Grand Rapids to celebrate Christmas and my daughter’s 8th birthday. These are two special holidays that are a mere five days apart. We ditched the presents to each other (a bold move when you are a kid) and rented a beautiful home in Grand Rapids, Michigan and visited every attraction we could squeeze in together.
It was in the midst of an ice storm that we happened to make our trip out there. It was an ice rink outside as we had to gingerly take a step with our arms linked tightly together, just to try to get down the steps of our lake cottage. My husband had an iron grip on the wheel, color drained from his face, as we made it out in the treacherous conditions to give our kids the best little holiday ever.
And it was.
You can see & just feel the joy in these moments.
I set my phone aside and really dove in on this trip with my camera. I was so proud of these pictures.
I have all of these beautiful and amazing moments and guess what I did with them?
Nothing.
I am a great storyteller of moments in Facebook, I might be able to grab your eye on Instagram with pictures, but I don’t do anything with these for myself. Instead of sitting on a couch flipping through these moments with my grandkids someday, I will be pulling them over to my computer and trying to search through my folders and feeds to show them what their mom and dad used to look like. It isn’t the picturesque family moment that I want to share with them. That is where ThisLife by Shutterfly comes into play. I am going to show you how this can help you be a better historian no matter what device or sharing platform you use and how I finally took these images off my computer and brought them to life for our family.
As storytellers of our family, we now use multiple platforms to share our stories. These moments can quickly become jumbled or lost and it is difficult to remember where and how we have shared our images. ThisLife is an amazing subscription-based service that can quickly organize and sort your moments by date, making it quick and easy to share your family’s stories. Not only does it gather the images from your computer, but it gathers them from the places you are socially sharing in the same dated format. Do you share on Instagram, Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Shutterfly, or SmugMug? Link your account and it will grab and sort all of your images in one location. Half the battle is in the sorting and, let’s face it, very few moms I know have time to gather and incorporate all their moments on all the places they are sharing socially. This grabs them and sorts them with ease.
Once the images are all sorted, it makes it so much easier to begin sharing your family’s story. You can actually create a Story from the images and then share it with your family and friends through email or by sharing a link to your story like this one I created of our family vacation. This is so great for grandparents or for anyone who doesn’t want to share their images publicly. You simply select the images (that have already been sorted for you) and then click Stories and add a New Story to create a format for sharing groups of moments with your family and friends.
A search under people sorts all of the people in your life alphabetically and tells you how many pictures you have of them. Want to make a photo album for a friend that’s moving away of all your years together? No problem! Want to put together an album of just one child? Easy peasy. Want to see how much better you look as you age and wow yourself? I totally did that.
Do you travel to exotic locations (more exotic than, say, Grand Rapids?)? Do you vacation every summer in Nantucket? I will be a good friend and tell you that you can sort your images by places and make albums of all of these fun things that you are doing that I am not doing.
ThisLife offers several different membership plans, with additional options for larger collections.
Of course, the beauty in this for this amazing storyteller who doesn’t share her stories, is that you can print these photos out in a book and actually have something to show your grandkids someday. Select all your images that you want (all perfectly grouped) and then click Create to transfer them over to Shutterfly to make an album. Add captions so you don’t forget the treacherous ice storm you weathered for the perfect family holiday or that root beer tasting that you did with your kids that they couldn’t stop talking about. Get it all in an album and ship it right to your door to remember those moments forever. You can check out the album I made below using their Modern template.
Click here to view this photo book larger
Now that I have shown you how wonderful this service is, I am excited to be giving away one (1) standard subscription to ThisLife so you can be the ultimate storyteller of moments in your family. You can enter this giveaway by following the instructions below in the Rafflecopter widget!
a Rafflecopter giveaway
Check out some other fun ways you can use ThisLife for your photos from a few of my favorite blogging friends!
This post is sponsored by Shutterfly, Inc. in partnership with Resourceful Mom Media. I have received compensation for my time and a membership to ThisLife to share my honest thoughts and opinions on their service.
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