What to do with your travel photos? My Ideas with Photoweb

What to do with your traveler photos? We share them a lot on the internet and social networks, but then, very often, they remain dormant on the memories of our hard drives and fall into oblivion. It’s a shame. However, the possibilities for using them and bringing our travel memories to life in our daily lives are numerous.

With the forced immobility that we have been living for a year because of the coronavirus epidemic. I finally took the time to make a significant classification of all my travel photos for the past fifteen years! A hell of a job, to be honest, but getting back into it has done me a lot of good. While waiting to be able to travel freely again without health constraints, I had the opportunity to be able to travel virtually, without leaving home. I tested several ideas with the Photo website, such as creating a photo album or making wall decorations with an aluminum photo board or prints on different supports. This is the result of my experience.

Travel photo album: all my advice

This is not my first photo album. It is a product I like to make from time to time to have a beautiful object in my hand to remember my travels, and I can store it in my library alongside my beautiful travel books. It’s an excellent medium to show to your family or friends to talk about your adventures and share your memories. The exercise requires a bit of photo selection and layout work, but nothing insurmountable! I have perfect memories of my trip to Albania in 2019 and wanted to make a photo album of it.

Once you have defined your subject, the first step to making an album is to select the photos. You need about a hundred pictures for a small album (about 25 pages). I advise you to count an average of four images per page, knowing that for some pages, there will be just one or two and for others five or six. Select a good mix of horizontal and vertical photos: this will allow you to vary the layouts.

Next, you need to choose the album template from the choices given. Landscape, square, portrait… It’s up to you to decide which format and type of cover suit you best. Until now, I opted instead for the “landscape” model, but this time I wanted to do “portrait” for a change. I am also thrilled with the result because it looks more like beautiful travel book. On the Photo web, I took the “Prestige Portrait Photo Book,” which starts at 35.95 euros for the 26-page version (then 0.89 euros per additional page).

Save Money with “Izzie”

After you choose between two methods to create the album, do everything manually, which takes more time Or choose “Izzie,” the creation assistance tool offered by Photo web, which saves time! It is this second formula that I chose because I wanted to be able to make my album quite quickly, and the result is not bad at all! I then reworked the model a lot because I wanted to add titles and texts, but the important thing is that it gives an excellent base to start with. Then you can, in any case, invert the photos you want and change the layout.

Then you can start uploading photos to Photo web. Namely: the images will appear in the chronological order of the shooting. If you take pictures with several devices (this is often the case with a camera and phone), ensure during your trip that they are set at the same time. This will make it much easier for you to classify the photos afterward (switching to summer or winter time can produce annoying delays if a device does not make the change on its own). For those (like me) who rework their photos on lightroom-type software, this is not a problem because Photo web classifies the images by the date of shooting and not by the date of creation of the retouched photo file.

Izzy completes album project

The next step is the layout of the album. With Izzie, we already have a first working version. The interface is quite simple to make modifications to. You can easily replace one photo with another and completely change the layout. And add text blocks to write text and photo captions. For the font, experiment to choose the one you like the most. And then be careful to keep the same for the whole album. It is better for the aesthetic coherence of the whole. Regarding themes and backgrounds, Photo web offers quite a few options. But for my part, I am always faithful to the white background without frills or other decorations.

Once the layout is complete, I advise you to wait a day or two before proceeding with the order. In haste, we do not always make the right choices. In addition, letting the album “rest” allows you to see it again with a fresh eye. Remember to re-read texts and captions several times because typos always go unnoticed. Feel free to ask someone else to proofread.

Make a wall decoration with your travel photos.

This pandemic year has given me a lot of time to sort and classify my travel photos. But it has also changed my relationship with my apartment. I must say that before, at home, it was above all a pied-à-Terre between two mother daughter trips, and I returned quickly to unpack my bags before leaving for a new destination, with the multiple confinements. The desire was born to live more in my apartment and personalize it with my travel photos.

I chose to decorate my office space, which was a bit dull with a big white wall. Seeing beautiful travel landscapes is still more fun when you look up from your screen. As this is the first time I have enlarged my photos, I wanted to test several different supports to be able to compare. In addition, I like the idea of mixing different types of frames and enlargements. The possibilities are very numerous on the Photo web. Photo poster, framed poster, aluminum, PVC or Plexi photo board, photo canvas, photo on wood… The hardest part is choosing which one!

For my photo of Moscow, Red Square at night. I chose the aluminum photo board version, 40×30 format (budget 34.95 euros). The result is excellent! Graphic, modern, bright. The colors look great. I also regret not having taken a slightly larger format. I was careful because I was not sure of the rendering of my enlarged photo. The aluminum photo board is very suitable for this kind of urban photo.

Major flaw discovered in Page Templates

For my two other photos. I enlarged my sunset photo over the U-Bein bridge in Burma in a 40×30. Framed poster with a wooden frame (budget 39.95 euros). And that of the Fagrifoss waterfall in Iceland on a 23×30 PVC photo board (budget of 19.95 euros). Of the three types of support, I would say that my preference is the aluminum photo board. Then the framed poster, and finally the PVC photo board. In the end, anyway, I like the mix of different styles.

Suppose you can’t decide between this or that photo before making an enlargement. I advise you to first-order simple, small-format prints. It’s inexpensive (about 0.18 cents per photo) and on photo paper. You can see the rendering and the colors much better. The images that look best on the computer are not necessarily the ones that look best in print. So it’s better to make sure beforehand. In addition, it’s nice to have his photos in paper format as in the days of film.

Tip for hanging photo prints.

Tip for hanging photo prints. It’s always a bit of a tricky question. How to fix your photos to the wall while damaging it as little as possible. For the framed poster, I drove a self-drilling screw into the wall. Difficult to hang a frame without making a hole. Because, with the weight of the glass and the wooden frame, it needs a good grip on the wall.

On the other hand, for the two photo boards, aluminum and PVC, which are pretty light, I found a great trick that I recommend! Get 3M Command Picture Hangers. They allow you to fix a light painting on a wall without damaging it. In addition, the tables can be swapped if the format is identical. I discovered this concept of catchphrase while making this article, and I found it brilliant!