I have way too many photos that are stuck on my computer or external hard drives. And I really want to have these photos out and in the real world. The past year I’ve made a real effort to put together photobooks and print them. Since this time last year, I’ve made 4 photobooks. A trip to France, 2012 in Review, a weekend with some girlfriends and a family trip to the Grand Canyon – all printed, bound and displayed on a bookshelf. Awesome.

I decided to start on Miles’s baby book. Yikes. I have thousands and thousands of photos. First, I’m a photography enthusiast (ok, nerd) and second, this is my first and only child. Thousands of photos is not an exaggeration. I also have a folder of his baby ‘stuff’ – ultrasound images, hospital paperwork, handouts from his baby wellness checks – that I want to include too.

I’m going to do his book chronologically, starting with his birth day. I’m not sure how much of his first year I’ll include, but it will definitely

A bit about my photo organization. I use Lightroom for pretty much everything photo related. I organize, edit, export for print, export for the blog, upload to Facebook, upload to Flickr, upload to Shutterfly, make photobooks and whole bunch of other stuff all from Lightroom. I can make photo collages in LR as well, but I usually send them to Photoshop  and a copy of the edit comes back to Lightroom. Its a super powerful program, and I’ve been using it since 2007. I love it. The great thing about LR is that its a non-destructive editor. Any changes, edits, tags etc that you make in LR is stored in the database, called a catalogue, and won’t change the original photo file.

My 2009 and 2010 photos are on an external hard drive, and to make this process easier for me, I created a new LR catalogue titled “Miles” that just references the actual photos on the external drive. So far, I’ve gone through and edited and then exported the initial batch photos I plan to include.

So far, I’ve got 10 pages.  And, man. My baby is almost 4 years old. I’m looking at these photos in disbelief. I don’t remember him being this small. I’m really happy I’m finally putting this together.

Here’s a sneak peek.