What to do with your travel photos after your trip
Ideas to help you preserve your travel memories for years to come
You’ve returned from an amazing trip where you experienced new adventures, saw some fantastic sights and made the best memories. But now you’re home, you’re left with a suitcase full of laundry and a phone or camera full of the photos you captured.
But what do you do with all those travel photos? Because they’re the one tangible reminder of your trip – the scenery, the places you explored and the memories you made. The last thing you want is to leave them forgotten on a hard drive or buried in your phone gallery.
I’ve put together this guide to share some ideas for what you can do with your travel photos, from simply getting them organised and printed to creating a photo book, so you can keep those unforgettable moments alive for years to come.
Why we never get around to doing anything with our photos
When you arrive back from your trip, you’re still on a high from everything you’ve seen and experienced. As you’re scrolling through your travel photos, the memories are fresh in your mind and every image makes you smile. You’re determined not to let them get lost amongst the thousands of other photos on your phone or left in a folder on your hard drive and you want to do more than just share a few of them on social media.
But before you know it, everyday life takes over and you’re back to the daily grind. Finding the time is hard and when you do get that small window of opportunity and enthusiasm, that soon starts to fade as you stare at a screen full of photos and feel completely overwhelmed.
Where do you even begin with sorting through them, let alone deciding which ones to print or include in a photo book?! It feels like an impossible task and, even with the best intentions, six months pass and you’ve barely even looked at them since you got home.
Start by organising your travel photos
Taking these few simple, manageable steps to organise and curate your travel photos then makes the next stage much easier…
Don't try to do it all in one go
One of the biggest barriers to actually organising your travel photos is thinking you have to do it all in one go.
My advice…start small. Tackle the photos from one day, a single location of your trip, or just spend fifteen minutes at a time. Breaking it down into manageable chunks means you’re much more likely to finish the job.
Remove duplicates and blurry images
The easiest win is to delete any photos that are blurry or out of focus. You’ll never end up printing them out or including them in a photo book so they’re not worth keeping.
Then, have a look at whether you have any duplicates or very similar versions. If you’ve taken multiple photos of the scenery from a particular viewpoint, or several similarly posed shots in front of a landmark, choose the strongest one and discard the rest. Although they might be slightly different, they’re all capturing the same moment and you’re not losing any memories by deleting most of them.
The aim isn’t to keep as many photos as possible, it’s to create a cohesive collection that reflects your trip without lots of similar photos.
Organise your photos by day, place or activity
Once you’ve narrowed down your collection, the next step is to organise the rest into folders or albums.
How you do this will depend on your individual trip. If you visited multiple locations, you could create a folder for each location. Or, if you stayed in one place, you can organise by day (good for shorter breaks) or group your photos by activity such as beach, day-trips, sightseeing and evening.
This not only makes it easier to find individual photos later on, but if you’re planning on printing them out or creating a photo book, it makes everything much easier as you’re not faced with a screen full of unorganised photos.
Highlight your favourite photos
Now your photos are more organised, it’s useful to mark or highlight your favourites. These are the photos that make you stop scrolling and think “Oh I love this one!”
If your photos are on your phone gallery, then there may be a heart or other symbol you can tap, or if they’re stored on your laptop or a desktop then you may be able to label them a different way or do what I do and create a smaller favourites folder so you can find them more easily when it comes to printing them out or creating a photo book.
Turn your travel photos into something tangible
Organising your travel photos does feel like a bit of a chore but that effort is well spent because now, getting those images off the screen and transforming them into a format that gives them more visible presence, will be much easier.
Printing a carefully curated selection means that you can display and view them easily without having to constantly scroll through an ever-increasing gallery of images to find them. By doing this, you’re more likely to keep those amazing memories alive, not gradually fading away.
Here’s a few ideas of what you can do…
Single Framed PHotos
Choose that one image (if you can choose just one!) that you keep looking back at.
Whether it captures a favourite moment, place or just captures you and your loved ones looking happy and relaxed, giving it pride of place gives you that reminder of that trip every time you walk past.
A photo collage frame or group of individual prints
Choose a small selection that gives a snapshot of your trip, bringing together the places, experiences and people that made it special.
By grouping these photos together, they convey the feel of the trip at a glance.
A travel photo book
A great way to bring more of your travel photos together in one place, rather than having to choose just a handful to print and display
Why create a travel photo book?
Creating a photo book from your travel photos does involve a bit more planning than just selecting and printing a few individual photos, but what it gives you is all those visual memories and moments in one accessible book.
When you bring all those images together, they become more than a collection of individual photos, allowing you to see the trip as a whole. And there are a few reasons why this works particularly well for travel memories…
It captures the whole experience
Travel is about so much more than the scenery or the landmarks. In a photo book, you can include all the smaller moments and memories you captured during your trip – from the special meal you ate and the places you discovered to the candid moments and funny memories that made the trip unique.
It lets the photos tell the story of your trip
When your photos are brought together in a considered order, they start to tell the story of your trip rather than just showing individual moments. Flicking through the pages brings all those memories back to life, taking you right back to the trip in a way that a few isolated printed photos just can’t.
Your whole trip in one easy to revisit book
Having your photos together in one tangible place makes it so much easier to look through the photos from your trip than it is to scroll through your phone gallery or swipe through images on a screen. A photo book can sit on your shelf where it’s ready to be picked up and flicked through whenever you want to relive those memories.
How to create a travel photo book
You’ll find a wide range of online services which allow you to create your own photo book using their software with drag and drop templates or pre-designed layouts. These vary in price, quality and style with a lot of different aspects to consider; from the binding, the type of cover, size and even the paper they are printed on.
The process can take much more time than you expect; you need to sort through all your photos, decide which ones to include and in which order they should appear. That’s before you even begin to put them into a layout. What might start out seeming easy, can soon turn into a challenge!
If the thought of doing it yourself sounds a bit too overwhelming, you can always hand it all over to an expert…
Introducing Wanderlust Moments
Wanderlust Moments is my bespoke travel photo book service, where I take your collection of travel photos and create a professionally designed and printed book for you.
I can help you choose the photos to include, advise on the size, cover, paper and other specifications, then design the layouts and arrange the printing.
So you can preserve those travel memories without having to find the time to tackle it all yourself – because, let’s face it, the longer it gets left, the less likely you will be to get around to it at all!
Find out more about my Wanderlust Moments photo book service →
About me
If you’d like to know a bit about me…
I’m Gill Challis, a photo album designer with over 13 years of experience creating bespoke, high-quality photo albums for busy people who don’t want to leave their photos and memories left in the digital abyss.
