Tips for taking photos:

1.  When your kids look back on photos, will they even believe you were there? Are you ALWAYS the one behind the lens? Here are some great tips to get you back into the picture: 7 ways to get mums into the picture 
2.  Sometimes you need a little inspiration to take cool and different shots.  Fat Mum Slim hosts a monthly photography challenge with daily prompts: FMS Photo a Day.  You can follow others playing along on instagram and be inspired! The Mummy and the Minx plays each month and you can follow us here: the Mummy and the Minx on IG
3. We spoke to the beautiful Bree from Bree Naomee Photography about some tips for taking great photos of kids and we came up with this list: Tips for taking great photos of kids. AND watch out for a wonderful give-away we have coming up from the very talented Bree.
4. A few great tips for taking photos with your iPhone from the Organised Housewife: Lots of iPhone tips and tricks

Tips for storing your photos:

5. Some easy and practical tips on sorting out your photos: 10 Tips to get your photos sorted
6. And a few more: Beautiful Mess: Tips for storing and organising photos

Now, we will warn you, it gets a bit techy at this point, but these are worth a read:

7. Using iCloud to back up your photos (and all the other things that live on your iPhone): creating a comprehensive iOS backup strategy
8. Google + Photos will eventually replace Picassa, this long but useful post helps you understand it Using Google+ to do awesome things with your photos
   

There are also some great tips in our challenge this week.

Tips for Using Photos:

9. The books you can create online with your photos are pretty amazing and it’s great way to preserve memories. This site compares some of the more popular software: Photo Book Review  The comparison does not include Apple’s iPhoto products, but they are also great. If you do your best work on an iPad or iPhone, try Mosaic Photo Books
10. We found this awesome post from Just Imagine – Your Daily Dose of Creativity. It has 25 Creative Handmade Photo Craft and Gift Ideas and some of them are truly lovely.
11. Did you know that you can actually print directly onto fabric with an inkjet printer and a bit of (American) freezer paper? Amazing! Read how to do it here: Print on Fabric using Freezer Paper  Just think of all the creative things you can do! note: you can buy Reynolds freezer paper from Spotlight stores in Australia.
12. Photos in jars: just beautiful! 
13. This is an idea Sarah borrowed from her neighbour. It makes it so easy to update the photos and is very affordable. Plus it can be used for other things such as kids artwork, Christmas cards, or other lovely little bits and pieces that you’d like to adorn your walls with. Get to your nearest Ikea for your Dignitet materials and get hanging.

14. A great tutorial on how to hang photos in your home like a pro: Love Grows Wild: Living Room Gallery Wall
15. At baby E’s first birthday, Robyna hung some paper bunting with photos for each his 12 months.  You can download a template to do the same here:
    (note the template will automatically download as a docx file, which can be opened in Pages or Word. It definitely works in Pages, but it may not look quite right in older versions of Word – sorry!)

 And now for our challenge: Are you ready to get those photos sorted?

• Make sure that you have saved all the MMS pictures on your phone that you want.  An easy way to do this is to search for “Attach” over your text messages.  Any images texted to you will appear.  From here, you can save them onto your camera roll.
• Download all photos on your camera and phone to your computer.
• Back up all your photos to a USB stick (or several or to an external drive if you have loads).
• Give that USB stick/drive to a friend or family member to keep somewhere safe – don’t keep at it your place.
• Consider backing up to cloud storage: iCloud and Google Drive are both great.
• Choose 50 photos to print out and either place in album or hang in your home.
• Make a checklist (you can use ours) to ensure your photos are regularly downloaded & backed-up.

Got any great tips for taking, storing or creating with photos?