Simple Ways to Gather Your Photos Before Graduation

The celebration of your kid's achievements (and yours!) over the past 18 years is an ideal time to showcase your favorite memories with photo boards and displays, slideshows, and photo books. However, it’s one of the more difficult tasks for a parent of a high school senior to face because of the rollercoaster of emotions.

Going through photos and choosing the perfect shots for graduation announcements, slideshows, or gifts brings a senior parent face-to-face with the cruel passage of time. This leads some parents to put off the task, until suddenly it’s the week of graduation and you’re crying over a photo of your now-bearded son as a 5-year-old picking you a bouquet of dandelions.

To better manage the nostalgia and all the feels, get started on the steps below as early as possible in your child’s senior year. September is ideal, but if you're reading this in March that's OK too. The important thing is to just get started. Removing the urgency from the tasks will allow you to feel your feels in small doses and identify your best photos, rather than haphazardly slapping some photos on a display board the night before the grad party.

• Sort your printed photos and set aside your favorites: If your graduate was born before you purchased your first camera phone, you likely have printed photos around your house that are not part of your digital collection. Look through old albums, boxes, and other places you may have tucked a photo away for safekeeping. Don’t forget the frames on your wall — sometimes our only copy of a photo is framed and displayed and we forget to add it to our collection.

• Scan your favorite printed photos into your digital collection: If you don’t have access to scanner at home or in your office, there are scanning apps available for your phone that will utilize your phone camera as a scanner. These apps typically produce low quality images but they will get the job done in a pinch. If you want high-quality digital images, you can seek the help of a professional Photo Manager or use a digitizing service such as Forever.

• Set up facial recognition in your digital collection: Most photo organizing software like Google Photos, Amazon Photos, and Apple Photos have facial recognition built in. However, it can sometimes get faces wrong, especially children’s faces as they grow. To check the accuracy of the facial recognition in your photos, go to the ‘People’ section of your photos app and click on each face to assign a name to that face. Once faces are accurately labeled, you’ll be able to quickly search your entire photo collection for pics with a specific person in them. Very useful when it’s the night before the grad party and you realize you need to find your favorite pic of your kid with her best friend on the day they met in first grade!

• Pull your favorite photos into a folder or album: Going through 18 years of photos can be the most difficult part of the process for senior parents because it brings up big feels. Set a goal to accomplish this slowly over senior year so you’re not a crying mess the day before graduation. (Ask me how I know)! Create a folder or album title “Graduation” in your photo organizing app and slide photos in there as you come across them throughout the year.

• Design & print your grad party invites: As senior year comes to an end, it’s time to plan the celebration! You can choose one or a few of the photos from the “Graduation” album you created to design and print party invites or graduation announcements. If you have graphic design skills, you can desing your own and have them printed locally or through an online print shop. If you’re like me and your artistic abilities extend only as far as drawing stick figures, you can use one of the many companies that offer pre-designed templates you can plug your photos into.

• Prepare photo displays to celebrate your graduate: There are a lot of creative ways to display photos, including photo boards, photo books and albums, and looping slideshows. You can also create a mini-slideshow to share on social media. Again, the “Graduation” album you created in you photo organizing app will make this easy because you already have your favorite photos set aside. You can print these photos and glue them to a display board, upload them to a website to make a custom photo book, or use a software like Powerpoint or iMovie to make a slideshow.

Organizing your photos for your child’s graduation is a big task. Getting your photo collection organized ahead of time can make it much easier. But even if senior year has flown by and you haven’t looked at a single photo yet, all is not lost. You can enlist the help of a photo-savvy friend or relative, and professional Photo Managers like me are always standing by ready to help.