www.mixbook.com is one of my favorite sites. Insert your photos and add special memories and they print and send you the finished project. You can choose hardcover or softcover. It's a wonderful book you can keep for later...without all the work or organizing a photo album...perfect for a mom. Plus, it's great for making a personalized gift. <3

Same idea, but I use blurb.com.

I made a poster for the first year I did a photo a day. The for the remaining 4 years I did photo books in blurb. The poster of the first year is something I plan to repeat if I ever I have a second child, but continuing for another 4 years-I'm not so sure about.

http://thedailyhayley.blogspot.com/2008/01/passage-of-time.html

I agree with stefsie - I would do a poster, but only for the first year.

I made a 1st year photo book from Blurb and was thrilled with the results. I'm a graphic designer and wanted to be able to customize the whole thing, so this service was perfect for me. But it seemed like they had a lot of great options for the non-InDesign-inclined as well. My goal was to do 1 album per year, but so far I'm 2 years behind.....

stefsie - I LOVE the poster! Great idea! Did you use a special tool to make it, or just design it yourself and have it printed poster size?

Framed photo poster for the first year. Books for each year since. I use MyPublisher. I don't know if it's budget-friendly or not; they're keepsake books, so I didn't mind spending on them. If you're on a budget, just take your disc or card to Costco or somewhere and have all the prints made, then put them in a large album. That would be cheaper than making photobooks.

I feel like a crappy mom for not having the great idea for the photo-a-day poster. how wonderful that you have that record of your baby's first year. Sweet!

The first year poster is a great idea! @Stefsie did you use a specific photo site or program for the poster?

(Was it Ohdeedoh years ago that I saw a poster size canvas with 365 pictures?)

Thanks for all great ideas so far. PLEASE keep them coming. :)

xoxo
amy

What about putting them all together as a slide show that almost looks stop motionish. That way they'd be in something easy to look at and easy to share with loved ones. I haven't tried this out myself yet, but I've been looking into Animoto for that type of thing!

I just bought a whole huge lot of wedding favor placecard frames at around a buck a piece and am using them to cover a wall of photos of my kids. Of course, 365 of them even at a dollar might be pricey--there are cheaper options--but what a stunning wall display. You could also buy larger frames to enlarge some of your favorites to add emphasis and interest to the display.

You could also print them as 4 x 3's, put paper clips on either end of the print and string them across several ribbons arranged vertically on an open wall.

Also, don't forget a digital display frame; my mother has one and although I originally scoffed at the idea, I have to say I enjoy watching it every time I visit.

For my daughter, Annabelle, I created a (private) blog for family and friends called The Daily Annabelle. I posted a photo of her every day for her first 365 days. Of course, many of these photos were taken on the same day, and I often pre-loaded photos, but it shows a general progression of her growth. And it's forever frozen in cyber space - I'd be lying if I said I didn't periodically get on and just scroll through those pictures of my tiny baby.

For Christmas, I'm making a book of the photos - for us and her grandparents.

And now I'm also considering the poster idea!

There are a number of free photo mosaic programs - you can select a master photo, which will be what the overall picture is, and then have some number of other photos which are stitched together to make the larger one. They're pretty fun!

We set up slide shows for our girls. We debut it on their birthday (on the computer in our living room) and then it serves as our screensaver, too. Our daughters love looking at those pictures!

I use the Creative Memories digital program and love it. The books are more expensive than blurb, but the print quality is way better.

We're not to year one yet, but I've been taking pictures incessantly for nine months. I made a blurb book for our wedding album, and I was absolutely thrilled with it. We plan to make a photo book every year, with notes about her favorite songs, toys, and so on. As our little one gets older, we're going to scan our favorite artwork, stories in her handwriting, etc. to incorporate into the book. Not that I won't still have a cardboard box full of construction paper creations, but each volume will be a treasured snapshot of a year in her little life. Extra copies make good grandparent gifts too!

Like many others who've commented already, we use blurb. We create an "Eliza book" each year with our daughter's photos. We print a hardback copy for grandparents and aunts for a Christmas gift. It's been a huge hit. And our daughter loves looking at the books. I highly recommend it.

Me three - we do the annual blurb book, too, because our daughter can look at - pages with photos glued on required supervision so they didn't get pulled off and chewed on, so effectively they never came out of the cabinet.

Not at all cheap, though - $75 is what we generally spend.

We upload all the 'keeper' photos to Flickr several times a week to share with distant family, so we don't get behind, and then we winnow down our Blurb selection from that.

Time consuming, expensive, but the best way I've found to get the photos out of the computer!

Make a calendar! it's a great christmas gift for family (especially the grandparents)

Delete them. Go through the folder and mark all those you'd like to keep, move the "keepers" to a different folder. Don't keep a picture just because it has your kid in it. Only keep pictures you'd like to frame some day. If you have 2 pictures that are almost the same, keep only one. Go through the folder again few months later and mark the pictures you missed the first time around, move them to the "keepers" folder. Delete the rest.

I haven't tried blurb yet, but it's on my list of things to do. haha.

I have made an album of our photos and I've created a private flickr page to upload pics for family to see easily. It is really time consuming to manage photos regardless of how you do it. I'm about to have baby #2 and can't decide how to approach the albums. I feel like chronological would be easiest. But I know that would mean that baby #2 won't have an album dedicated just to him.

That's probably when I'll start to do the blurb books. That way the albums can remain chronological, and the books can be more child specific.

I'm lazy, so I have all of my photos on my computer still (they're backed up too). Although I would recommend reducing down, I find that when I revisit folders later on, I'm surprised that I didn't print or select different photos to post to flickr. In some instances I've printed some I thought were cute that didn't make the first round of edits. So I'm kinda glad for my laziness.

I also like to have a few sequence photos. They're kind of fun to look at, and the kids could eventually do fun things with them (make those little action flip books or whatever), so I have a tonne of photos that are almost the same.

Although I don't actually have family photos framed around my house, as a child, I enjoyed looking through photo albums. I'm doing this so that my kids can have the pleasure of sitting down and viewing photos from throughout their lives. All photos have the date at a minimum on the back, but I like to include some geographical information, and little anecdotes too. This is another reason why it's time consuming!

Anyway, good luck!

we mounted a digital frame on the wall in the hall way. it looks like a picture frame but it cyces through our family photos. we have a tiny house so we barely have enough room for our art work let alone 1000 pics of our baby! Most digital frames are very easy to update- with memory card or usb. We also use batteries- no cord!

I make Smilebox slideshows and scrapbooks of special events such as births, grandparents' visits, vacations, Halloween & Holiday parties. I send these to the grandparents and special friends. Then, I bought Sony Digital Frames for each of the grandparents and our house, hopefully one for each of our offices also, and will stick USBs in each of those and update as needed. Love it! We have a few art pieces up in the house but I hate having tons of frames hanging around, so this works for us.