All about our mini accordion albums

One of my favorite heirloom products in the studio are our mini accordion albums! These sweet little books are one of the cutest ways to showcase your images from your portraits. They make perfect gifts - or are totally great to keep for yourself, too. Today, I wanted to talk more about why I love these sweet little mini accordions and why they’re one of the most popular products at the studio! 

Perfect Size for Gifting

Our mini accordion albums are 3”x3” and they’re perfect for tiny hands (and big ones, too!). I love giving these accordion albums as gifts. They’re a great little size for displaying on the bookshelf or looking through. In fact, a lot of our families give these to grandparents for the holidays! When you order the albums, you get 3 copies - making it even easier to give them as gifts, too! 

Durable Enough to Be Loved On

With magnetic covers, the accordion albums won’t spring open - which means they won’t fall over or get ruined. They simply snap back into place when you’re done looking at them. With a durable clear slipcover, they also won’t get dinged up if you like to carry it around! I’ve even had parents tell me they send one with their little one to preschool for when they’re feeling homesick!

These sweet mini accordion albums are truly a great addition to your heirloom products! Consider ordering a set for the holidays this year, or just to have in your own home. 

Product Spotlight - Our updated heirloom albums

I’m so excited to share this new upgrade to our ever-popular heirloom albums. Heirloom albums are some of my favorite products to create with my families, because they’re such a tangible way to tell your story that will be passed on for years to come. This year I started working with a new lab to offer even more cover choices to families when designing their albums, and I'm absolutely in love with the gorgeous linens and leathers that they offer. So, I wanted to take a few minutes today to show you a great look at our updated heirloom albums!

One of the best parts of designing these albums is knowing that my families love them. I hear stories all the time about how they keep their albums on low shelves or coffee tables so they can look through them often with their children. It's a keepsake meant to be treasured now and passed down many years from now. I say this from experience, too! Grayson loves pulling our family albums down off our living room built-ins and I love watching him thumb through our story. I loved it so much, I actually designed our built-ins to be wide enough to fit our ever growing pile of albums! That’s what I want for your family! I want to help you design a unique, one-of-a-kind album that you’ll cherish for years to come.

Here’s what makes our new heirloom albums even better:

10x10 Albums

I love 10x10 heirloom albums because they’re the perfect size to hold in your hands and spread open on your lap! Grayson does this all the time with our family albums! Because they’re not too large, the albums don’t feel too big or bulky. But, they're still the perfect size so that you can clearly enjoy your favorite portraits while turning the pages!

Crafted by hand with archival materials

Your heirloom album is meant to stand the test of time. It will look beautiful now, and after many years of turning the pages with your little ones and reliving these memories, it will look beautiful decades from now when you pass it down to your children and they bring these keepsakes into their own homes one day.

Thick, layflat pages printed on photographic paper

These sturdy pages are easy for little hands to turn! And, you never have to worry about torn or lost pages. Trust me, they won’t move! I also love that this paper and the semi-matte finish ensures little fingerprints aren't an issue.

Cover materials include European linens, genuine Italian leathers, vegan leathers, and suede!

When you think luxury album, you definitely think about the cover materials. These heirloom albums are offered in a variety of gorgeous colors and textures that will blend seamlessly with your home's decor!

Custom designed, just for you!

We use your favorite portraits from your session to tell a story that flows across the pages. You'll even get to be involved in the design process and see what your album will look like before we send it to print! I love this part, honestly - it’s always fun to see which images will highlight your story the best.

A note for my past clients with albums:

I still adore the albums that we created for your family, and if you'd like your new albums to match your previous albums, we can definitely do that for you! Most (though not all) of our old linen colors are still available from our other professional photo lab, as well as the custom image cover that wraps around the spine. The new albums are the same size and have a similar profile to our previous albums, so they will all sit side-by-side beautifully on your shelf whether you opt for the updated albums or the previous versions that we've been offering and that families have loved for the past 8+ years.

Tips to Organize and Print Your Family's Photo Albums

One of my biggest projects during quarantine last spring was to finally get caught up on printing my family’s personal photo albums. And by “caught up”, I mean get started.

I was hugely inspired by Kate L. Photography’s blog post about her annual yearbooks, and I decided to use the same printer (Blurb Books) and album size that she uses. I loved her colorful covers so much that I wanted those bringing cheer to our bookshelves, too, and I am so glad I did! The covers are one of my favorite parts of these albums! A huge thank you to Kate for the inspiration that I needed to finally tackle this project!

I had already printed 3 different albums since Grayson was born in 2018 with his Fresh 48 photos, first year photos in the studio, and some lifestyle images done by a photographer friend, but I still hadn’t done anything with all of the hundreds of other photos that we had taken over the past few years. We had thousands of photos on my phone and my husbands phone, and hundreds more that I had taken on my camera of our day-to-day adventures. I was overwhelmed with where to start, but I knew that I wanted to get those photos organized and printed so that we could start to enjoy reliving those moments again and again.

I wound up organizing my photos from 2018 and cranking out the design for the first book in a few days. When it arrived in the mail and I saw how interested Grayson was in reading the book, turning the pages, and talking about every single photo and every single story, I knew that this was definitely going to be my new priority.

I quickly created 2019’s book, and for the past year we enjoyed the set of books. Grayson literally pulls them off the shelf multiple times a week and will spend an hour looking through the pages and talking about our adventures. It makes my mama heart so happy to see how much he loves these books!

So with 2018 and 2019 in print, of course I made it a priority to capture even more moments of our day to day lives in 2020 with the goal of preserving these stories in our annual photo album. When it came time to create the album, I designed it in two nights and sent it off to print. Easy peasy!

Now, if you’re feeling like I was a year ago and you’re wondering where to even begin with the thousands of photos sitting on your phone and hard drive, I want to help you!

Keep reading for tips on organizing your photos and making this task something you look forward to instead of dread & avoid!

I have compiled some of the things I’ve learned from making my own albums, plus tips I’ve talked with friends about and strategies that they’ve found to work for them. Take what you will, and make it work for you!

1. Start small.

You know that quote that goes something like, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” This is how you want to approach this project. You don’t have to organize all of your photos at once. Start with the most recent ones and work your way backwards. Right now, just focus on last year. Do all of these tasks for one year at a time, and then when you’re done go back to the one before that until you’re all caught up.

2. Choose your favorites first.

If you have a ton of photos on your phone, this part is easy! I’ve only ever owned an iPhone so I don’t know how it works on an Android, but I’m sure it’s similar. Go through and click the heart/favorite button to mark all of your favorite photos. You can scroll back to look at the ones in a particular month/year. While you’re at it, go ahead and delete the screenshots, cast-offs, and any other photos that are just clogging up your phone. Put a reminder on your phone every evening for a week to spend 15 minutes going through and marking your favorites. Before you know it, you’ll have a whole year of favorites saved in an album that is ready to export!

3. Get the photos ready to print.

Now you need to get the photos off of your phone and onto your computer to design the album. Or you can use a printing company that will just let you upload from your phone. I hear that www.chatbooks.com is great for this! I have not personally used them, but I heard you can upload right from your phone.

You can plug your phone into your computer to transfer the photos. You can save them to the cloud or Dropbox and access them that way. You can AirDrop them. However you want to, get those photos onto your computer.

Are you going to edit them? This is a personal preference. I chose to adjust the brightness and color of most of my cell phone photos in Lightroom. I also used that to crop them to whatever crop I felt best suited each portrait. You can get a Lightroom CC subscription for just $9.99 a month, and this would be a great way for you to try out the software if you’re new to it!

When saving your photos, sort them by month to make it easy to plug them into your album. I export in Lightroom and I automatically have them sorted by capture date. This names them in the order the photographs were taken, and it is really easy for me to them put them together in a logical and sequential order when I go to design my book (next step!).

4. Design your album!

Most album companies have free software that lets you drag and drop your photos into templates to easily create your album. I recommend choosing a few of their pre-made layouts that you love and repeating those throughout the book. I tend to do layouts with 2-6 images on each spread, and sometimes I will do a page with 4-9 smaller but related images in a grid.

Make sure to not try and fit too many photos on each page because you want to be able to see the details in each one without making it feel cramped. I like layouts that have a little white space between the images and at the top & bottom of the page.

Don’t overthink it, and don’t let your perfectionist tendencies take over here. Done is better than perfect right now. If you keep tweaking the layout you will never get around to getting the album printed, and you’re going to get a lot more enjoyment out of it when sitting on the couch flipping through the pages with your little one than you will by spending another night moving photos around on your screen to see how they look a different way.

5. Print it & enjoy!

Once I designed my album I was so proud of it that I wanted to print it right away. But I had heard that Blurb Books ALWAYS has sales so I decided to wait for a sale — which is a good thing because my albums tend to have 110-125 pages!

Sign up for their emails and before you know it, you’ll get a notification about a sale. Simply upload it to print, and you’re done! Then you can start waiting by your mailbox for it to arrive, eager to tear open the box the minute it’s delivered. (Wait, I’m not the only one that does that, am I?!?!)

Psst!!! Use this link to save $30 on your first album! (affiliate link)

6. Create a system to stay organized moving forward.

After you’re all caught up and you’ve printed however many years worth of family photos that you have backlogged, create a system to stay on top of it.

Have only a few minutes a month?
Choose a time once a month to sort through your photos from that month and mark a few favorites. If you do this regularly, it will only take you 10-15 minutes to add a few to your favorites folder each month. Put it on your calendar or set a reminder on your phone, and make sure you do it! Then at the end of the year you simply open up that favorites folder and start designing your album!

Have an hour a month?
Pour a warm cup of tea or a glass of your favorite wine, put on some music, and get to work! Set that reminder on your calendar so this is an evening activity you can look forward to each month. Mark your favorite photos from the month, and upload them into an album design right then and there. As the year goes on you’ll slowly add to your album page layouts, and at the end of the year it will all be done for you and ready to print.

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A Peek at Our Family's Annual Photo Albums

Our annual family photo albums are definitely top on the list of “things I would save in a fire.”

Grayson pulls them off the shelf multiple times a week to flip through the pages, talk about the photos, and relive the memories and adventures we had. He loves sitting on my lap and reading them, and cozying up with Grandma or Dada to look through the pages.

I finally started creating annual photo albums last year during quarantine. I had printed a few albums of Grayson’s first year, but nothing that held all of our cell phone photos and images captured on my nice camera from our daily lives. When the world slowed down last spring, it was the perfect time to me to get caught up, organize my photos, design a few albums, and get them printed.

I am so proud of these albums, and I love seeing how much joy they bring to our lives. I made 2018 and 2019’s albums last year, and it motivated me to continue capturing photographs throughout 2020 (even when we were just staying home and not doing anything that exciting!). By documenting our everyday lives and the little things that make up the year, I love how it all comes together to tell the story of our family and our year. So 2020’s album, while it may not be filled with trips and friends and visits with family, is still chock-full of memories, so many silver linings, lots of laughs, and plenty of love.

I was hugely inspired by Kate L. Photography’s blog post about her annual yearbooks, and I decided to use the same printer (Blurb Books) and album size that she uses. I loved her colorful covers so much that I wanted those bringing cheer to our bookshelves, too, and I am so glad I did! The covers are one of my favorite parts of these albums! A huge thank you to Kate for the inspiration that I needed to finally tackle this project!

I can’t even begin to count how many dozens of times I have walked down the stairs to find Grayson sitting on the couch, carefully turning the pages of an album and talking about the pictures. It melts my heart!

Overwhelmed with how to begin organizing your own photos? Another helpful blog post is coming later this week filled with tips to get you started!

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Product Feature: A Real Family's Heirloom Album

This family’s heirloom album was ready at the same time my peony bushes were in bloom, so of course we had to do a little photo shoot for the album!

Our Heirloom Albums are one of my favorite products that we can create from your family’s portrait session. We take all of your favorite images and weave them together to tell your family’s story. This 10x10 hardcover book is meant to be enjoyed by you and your kids. The pages are ultra thick and easy for little hands to turn. The portraits are vibrant with a protective coating on top that protects them from fingerprints and UV damage. And the linen covers hold up to dirt and fingerprints!

We have a stack of these albums for our family and Grayson looks through them ALL THE TIME. Seriously. All the time. It’s one of his favorite activities and it holds his attention like very few of his toys do.

Today, enjoy a peek at this gorgeous linen album!

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How to Care for your Artwork | Saratoga Springs Baby & Family Portrait Photographer, Nicole Starr Photography

Yay! Today’s the day! You have your beautiful new artwork from your portrait session, and you can’t wait to display it in your home. You know just the perfect spot to hang it up, but wait… did you know there are a few simple tips to keep in mind that will help your artwork stay beautiful and last longer???

Today on the blog I’m sharing a few tips for how to care for your artwork. Don’t worry! It’s nothing too complicated, just a couple of little things to keep in mind so that your family can continue to enjoy your portraits for many, many years to come!

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Photographic Prints

1. Keep your artwork out of direct sunlight to prevent fading and damage to the paper. All of our artwork is treated with a UV protective layer, but it is still a good idea to display your prints in a room that does not receive extreme heat or sunlight.

2. Photographic prints are meant to be displayed under glazing such as glass or acrylic. This is to protect the print from UV exposure, dust, and other elements that can be damaging to the composition of the material. Prints should be framed with acid free mats and acid free tape to avoid any moisture reaching your print and damaging it.

Wall Art

Canvases, framed portraits, wooden wall art. These tips are good for any heirloom pieces that are displayed on your walls! Follow these simple tips to enjoy your artwork for many years at home.

1. Keep your artwork out of direct sunlight, and avoid displaying it in a room that experiences extreme atmospheric changes (heat, cold, humidity).

2. Dust your artwork with a soft rag or cloth, or a wool duster.

3. Display your artwork in a room away from mess or a high traffic area — right near the stove in the kitchen is probably not a good idea since over time it can accumulate a thin layer of dust, grime, and cooking pollutants that could damage the artwork.

4. Prints should be framed under glass, while canvas is meant to be displayed without glass to allow it to breathe.

5. When transporting your artwork, pack it in a sturdy box and with bubble wrap, and avoid placing prints with glass on a flat surface to move them — they will break more easily if stored flat. I use painter’s tape to make an X across the glass of all of my artwork when moving them to prevent glass from going everywhere should one of them break. Luckily I’ve never broken a frame when moving, but I’m glad to take that extra step to prevent a big, dangerous mess!

Books & Albums

All of our albums are printed on archival photo paper, which means that your portraits are crisp, vibrant, and true to color on paper that is designed to last 100+ years. Our albums have ultra thick pages, making them durable for even the littlest pair of hands in your family to turn and enjoy. My toddler looks through our family albums all the time, and I never worry about him messing them up because they are meant to be enjoyed, and there is a coating on the pages that even protects against fingerprints!

But a few tips to keep your album looking just as beautiful as the day you brought it home:

1. Store your album away from direct sunlight to prevent UV damage and fading.

2. The pages are heavy and thick. To prevent them from separating from the spine of the book, store the album flat on a shelf or a coffee table (and not standing up on its side). I stack our family albums vertically on a bookshelf, and I love seeing the colorful linen spines all facing out into the room!

3. Keep your album in a room where the humidity does not fluctuate too much. If it gets too humid, the pages may warp as they absorb excess moisture. If this happens, simply place a heavy object on top of the album (with a dishtowel between the album and the object for extra protection) and let it flatten out again in a room that is not too humid.

4. Spots of stains on the cover? Wipe it down with a damp, white cloth.

Matted Portraits & Collection Boxes

These portraits are meant to be displayed under glass or acrylic glazing, so find a few of your favorite frames and pop them in around the house! The mat protects the portrait from touching the glass, and it is made from acid free paper to prevent any damage to the photograph over time.

You can also store your matted portraits inside the collection box when they are not on display. Be sure to keep them in a room that is not too humid.

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The most important tip for caring for your artwork?

Put it somewhere where you can enjoy it every day!

Choose a spot that will bring a smile to your face when you see it — in the living room over the mess of toys, at the top of the stairs to look at after a long day, over your little one’s crib to enjoy at bedtime. Put your album on a low shelf in your living room with other favorite family books to encourage little ones to enjoy it with you, and don’t tuck anything away out of reach. Out of sight, out of mind, right? And I don’t want you to forget about these beautiful memories we created together!

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