WHERE WILL YOUR KIDS FIND THEIR CHILDHOOD MEMORIES? | Leave a Family Legacy
Make a way for the photos & videos you take to be seen by future generations! Above is a film I made for my family of tiny video clips taken in 2022.
Your camera roll is stuffed with photos, screen shots, videos, GIFs, you name it…it’s probably there! As moms we take photos & videos on the daily & I’m thankful you do! Those babies are going to grow and long to see the love of their childhood but WHERE will your children find the goldmine of adorable songs they sung when the video is hidden between a recipe for a cheese ball & a screen shot with details of the school event you might attend. Will all the important memories die with a phone? Will the kids find their memories on an old Facebook or Instagram account or will the platform be a distant memory like Myspace??
LET’S FIX THAT!
My phone stopped working one day & none of the data was able to be recovered. Back in the days before I took video on my mirrorless camera, it all lived AND DIED with that phone, don’t be like me, let’s make a plan to save your precious memories before it dies with old technology or gets buried in burst shot of toy dragons the kids took!
DON’T LET THE IMPORTANT DAILY MOMENTS GET BURRIED!
Photos & videos are family treasures so let’s hunt for the gems & set them apart from the junk! Eventually you will have a backlog of months (let’s face it probably years) of data to sift through BUT let’s not get overwhelmed yet! Start from today & make a plan going forward. When you take pictures of your kids playing in a mud puddle or a video of your little girl saying something hilarious immediately place it into a specific folder that you create on your phone! Pick out the photos & videos that really make your heart sing & place it into a new folder titled something like “2023 Memories to KEEP” (creative right?!). The goal here is to do this regularly so you don’t get overloaded. Keep it bite-sized by doing the sorting immediately after you know you got something good, daily or, at least, weekly. When you forget for a month, give yourself grace, & start again! This folder is IMPORTANT, it holds part of your family legacy, so protect it! Back it up on the cloud & ALSO save it in another location like an external hard drive or another online storage location.
GET THE MEMORIES OFF THE PHONE & START ENJOYING THEM!
Now that you made a plan for where to store the digital information of your precious memories for your kids to find later, let’s get those photos in your hands & on your tv so they can enjoy them NOW! With your folder of important images take the photos & PRINT THEM! I like to have a set of images (or a photo book) that I don’t mind if the kids touch, carry, or likely end up in a mouth (because that’s how my house works😂) & then a nicer photobook which I can keep nice to enjoy for years to come! Maybe you could print loose prints, hang them on the fridge, place simple 4x6 prints into photo sleeves, or make a book on Blurb.
We all know how to get a photo printed, but what about the video clips?? What do we do with those short clips of gold? YOUR KIDS ARE GOING TO WANT THESE! When I showed our year-long family film I made (at the top of the blog) they laughed, squealed, told stories, remembered events they had already almost forgotten, & asked to watch it again & again until I forced them to go to bed! Your videos are an important piece of the legacy your leaving! Having the clips all together in a folder will be really helpful, but let’s take it a step further so you don’t have to click on each one to play! Take the clips that you marked as important & pull them into a video editing app, Place them on one timeline to save them all together so you can watch one after the other. I would suggest an app like Adobe Rush, it’s free & pretty simple to use. Rush is actually where I made my 1st couple film projects so I could test the waters of video, of course I then fell hopelessly in love & have since edited in Adobe Premiere Pro. This step can be as simple or as complex as you make it. I recommend keeping the audio & cutting out the parts where you accidently videoed the blackness of your pocket, then leave it (or get creative!). Export these clips together monthly & watch them with your family on your computer or screen mirror them on the tv. Your kids are going to LOVE watching these each month with you!
You are already taking the photos & videos of your family so let’s sort them, protect them & see them as valuable treasure! Your kids will be SO thankful to find their childhood memories!
ONE LAST THING MAMAS I plead with you to GET IN the photos & videos. You are usually the one behind the camera, but you are such an important part of your family; you should be in the memories! When your kids grow up they will yearn to hear your voice, to see you stroke their hair, they’ll want to remember the love of childhood with YOU there. Get in the frame! If you want help doing that in a beautiful way, I would LOVE to help you! Click below & let’s chat about a Family Film!
Want more resources to make meaningful memories for yourself? Check this out!⬇️
