I mentioned a few posts ago that I have a detailed system for organizing my pictures at home. Being the techies that we are at my house, we have a file server which holds all of our shared files, like documents, Quicken data and pictures. Lots and lots of pictures! The end of the year is always a busy time for me. I create gifts with my pictures!
I create calendars for my office at work. Well, make that TWO offices because I worked at two locations this year. I make hanging calendars.
I make desk calendars.
I make calendars to keep me organized, and give as Christmas gifts.
I make Christmas cards of course 🙂
I also make a December Daily book. The concept is to have a memory of each day in December. This has been such a great thing. I started making these books 10 years ago. I was really involved with digital scrapbooking back then, when I seemed to have more time on my hands. Even though little kids keep Moms busy, they also go to bed at 7pm which leaves Mom much more time than my teenagers who stay up to 9:30 every night!!
The most fun about my December Daily book for me is picking out which scrapbooking kit will be using. Just like getting all of those new supplies at the start of a school year, a new digital scrapbooking kit holds great promise!! For 2017 I’ll be using this kit, “Dear Santa”. I just love the color scheme and elements!
Some highly organized people actually create these books as December happens. Me? I’m more like a January finisher. I’m too busy making all of those calendars! But I do make sure I’m taking lots of pictures all through the month to use later.
I will sheepishly admit – I did not finish my books from the last 3 years!! Shame shame shame. And it has not gone unnoticed! My kids get the books out each year when we decorate the house and they asked where the books were. “I’m working on it!” 🙂
Oh, one other thing that I spend a great deal of time on each December is making a book for each of the kids of our “big trip” from the year. Since my kids don’t make paper photo albums like I used to, I like for them to have a souvenir of the vacation we took. One for each of them, so they won’t fight over them when I die. Yep, that’s a happy thought!! I do stick with 85% of the photos the same for each book, but swap out some personalized pictures for each of their versions.
I have one move VERY big digital scrapbooking project that I am working on, but that deserves a post of it’s own. I’ll share that with you soon!
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Thanks for stopping by, I love to hear from you!
How about you?……
Q: Have you been busy making any gifts this holiday season?
Q: Do you make photo books? Which company do you like the best?
I have have good luck with Shutterfly, but I also use ArtsCow and have used other companies in the past.
Q: Any other scrapbookers out there? Paper or digital??
Personalized calendars make great gifts! I made one for my parents with the kids pictures and they loved it! I too am very behind in the photo books. I’m just happy I made books for both boys when they were babies.
Sharon recently posted…California International Marathon (CIM) Race Recap 12/3/17
The baby books are my Achilles heel 🙁 I started them, but didn’t finish much at all. Like the teeth chart… never marked any of them! Ugh. My coworkers like seeing my calendars too, and looking at the adventures we took the previous year.
I remember our digital scrapbooking days. And, have the external HD to prove it! Glad to see you are keeping it up.
I was just telling the kids the other day about the Wacom tablet you have! I still have several classes that I paid for and haven’t taken yet at JS. I really want to get back into that to make my 365 project album easier. Soon I will!!
I only have 1 question, are you rocking a NAS or an actual server (or desktop as a server)?
See, the techie wants to know 🙂
I’ve been needing to get a NAS for awhile, but I don’t want anything fancy.
Daniel Clarfk recently posted…It’s all over….
It’s a Synology NAS. Alan said he’d give you the details… (reply to follow soon)
Syncology…ah yes! I’m too cheap to buy one but I’ve heard they’re great.
I may or may not be rocking an old Dell XP machine with a few externals hanging off of it….probably should remedy that sooner rather than later….
*cringe!*
The Synology home units are pretty affordable and way, way easier to use and nicer than a old PC with a bunch of drives. In the past I’ve used a Linux box with a RAID controller, and then various old PCs. Big reason why I switched was ease of use and low power consumption (first server used 150w 24/7/365). Think the Synology uses maybe 20w of power now, has probably paid for itself over the past 4 years with how little power it uses.
Our model is a DS213 with 2 3TB drives mirrored. A few years back one of the drives died and outside of the e-mail notification that it was dead, it didn’t effect anything. Actually had the kids swap it out while the machine was still running and it rebuilt the array automatically over the next day.
Newegg has the DS216se model for $149.99!
Thanks Alan for the great info!
One quick question, can the USB ports be used as additional storage (not in RAID obviously) for sharing?
Dan Clark recently posted…It’s all over….
Yep Dan, can stick in a USB device and share it. Just tested it with a USB stick and even that worked fine. Also has a SD slot, so you could even stick a card in and read the files that way.
For a home file storage system, it is hard to beat Synology.
Thanks! That settles it then, Syncology it is. I appreciate the info.
Dan Clark recently posted…It’s all over….
Bought the Synology DS218j today. Needed a new Ubiquiti switch anyways so bit the bullet and got both.
At least now I have new toys to play with over Christmas.
Thanks again!
Nice! You will be very happy with it, have had zero issues with ours all these years. Which is a far cry from when I was using a Windows based server!
I love the calendars! I don’t really organize my photos like I should. I just let everything back up to google, haha. But I think calendars are a great gift for Christmas, especially if you have kids or lots of family members to give to.
Amy Lauren Scott recently posted…Weekly Rundown: Dec. 4-10
I just started using Google Photos too, and a really love it! It’s made it so easy to find pictures sorted by days and be able to show people things that have already been deleted off my phone (because I take too many pictures!!) So hey, you’re one step ahead of a lot of people in backing up your pictures!!
That was actually a big reason why I got rid of the cobbled together Linux box we had for our first server. If I got hit by a bus, you would pretty much have known nothing about it! I think it had like 5 hard drives connected together via RAID and was a PITA to change things. With the Synology it is easy to admin through a web browser.
I used to do paper scrap books but I lost interest. Boy are things different. When I was a kid we had “real” photo albums and they took up so much room. Now, you can make books like you do or just digital albums. This year I made ornaments. It was a lot of work but lots of fun! In fact, I think I may make some more ornaments today…
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I used to be so much better about scrapbooking and printing pictures in general! Now I think its too easy to just save everything electrically and never do anything with it. Growing up and in college I used to take a million “real” pictures and always did stuff with them. Now, they just sit on my computer. We haven’t even made a wedding album and it’s been five years!
All of these look like great projects and you have inspired me to try to get a little creative this year:)
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