My kids have had iPods since they were quite young, thanks to our family policy of grown-upspassing down our old devices when we upgrade. Sometime last year (at the ages of 8 and 9), they started taking noticeably more photos. I think this might be because they started using more photo-related apps, including heavily supervised and monitored Instagram accounts. Gems like this started popping up on their “phones” (they use old phones that don’t have cell phone functioning, and essentially are like iPods):
We used the iCloud photo sharing features to set up shared folders on our iCloud so the girls can select and save their favourite photos to a central location, off their devices, to preserve them, and allow us access to them.
As shown above, the girls have a folder they created called “Sisters!!!” where they can put all their favourite shots of themselves. We also have similar shared folders on the iCloud for family events:
This is part of our folder for a trip we took to the Flower Pot Rocks in New Brunswick in 2015. You can see we’ve shared it with ourselves, as well as with the father of the international student who was staying with us that year. We could also share it with grandparents, friends, or anyone else who might want to see our trip photos. This allows us to all collaborate on an album of family photos, that includes photos from each one of us, and which we can all access whenever we like. The folder will show up in the iCloud section of the Photos for anyone who uses a Mac or an iPhone/iPod/iPad, and it will show as a link for those who use an other device. As a scrapbooker, I love this because I can then go in later and choose which photos I want to scrapbook, and I’m not limited to just the photos that I took.
This is a layout I created from one of the photos from the folder of pics from the Flower Pot rocks trip:
This photo was taken by my husband, but I also scrapped a number of my kids’s shots, especially in my project life for that month:
Many of the pics featured on this Project Life spread were taken by people other than me, and the variety of perspectives of the photos makes for a more dynamic, fun page. And the kids love when they see their own photos in my albums!
Some other ways the I get the kids photos into my pages:
- I get them or the parents of people they are with to text me pics of them at events I don’t go to.
- I get them to give me their iPods and send myself pics that I want to use.
- I taught them how to use my photo printer wirelessly so they can print their own photos and leave them for me to scrap, or for them to scrap themselves.
- I give them Project Life “kits” that I’ve made up for them to document certain events. A kit contains a handful of 3X4 and 4X6 cards, a few stickers, and letter stickers.
- I give them my Instax camera to capture moments at a sleepover.
- I “creep” their Instagram accounts and take screen caps of their pics. This not only allows me to scrap the pic itself, but I also get the Instagram interface, which someday we may look back on and say “remember when everyone was on Instagram?”
- I make sure I join the Facebook group of any activities my kids are involved in. My daughters’ Girl Guide patrols have private Facebook groups, and the leaders often post many pics from each event, so I get lots of behind the scene shots from events that parents don’t attend.
Want to hear more about scrapbooking with photos your kids take? I was a panellist on this week’s Paperclipping Roundtable podcast where we talked about how to gather up photos from your kids to scrapbook them. Steph from the Daily Digi had lots of really cool high-tech ideas!
