Scott recently ran the Maine Marathon in Portland on a Sunday so we turned the trip into a four-day, couples-only weekend (a perk of the FIRE lifestyle!).
We both love the water, and Maine has plenty of that, so we planned our pre-marathon Saturday around different water views – The Giant’s Stairs on Bailey Island, Two Lights State Park. By the end of the day, Scott had already taken over 100 photos!
We have this problem with every trip, from the short weekends away to our 2.5-weeklong trip in India in 2017. At this stage, we have our photos saved to the cloud and ordered by date only. What to do with all those travel photos is looming bigger and bigger on my mind.
Here are 7 ideas I am exploring:
1 – Old-fashioned photo albums
Snapfish is my go-to photo printer, and they frequently have 1-penny print specials, so the fastest way to get the photos off my mind and where I can see them is just to print them out. I use this option when sharing photos with others.
In 2017, the first year we finally got to do a lot of travel, our Greece trip included my mom for whom Greece is a bucket list item. Since my mom doesn’t enjoy digital photos, I printed out all the Greece photos that featured the family (she doesn’t like all-view, no people shots), and she organized them into one of her many photo albums.
I’ve considered doing that for my collection as well, since there is something very satisfying about paging through your memories. However, with thousands of photos and limited shelf space (we do live in New York City, after all), this isn’t practical or that cheap, once you factor in the cost of the photo albums.
2 – Photo books
I considered ordering premade photo books, which would eliminate the need for me to buy a separate photo album and insert the photos.
However, I still need to select the best of the bunch. Even for a short trip like Maine, that means culling over 100 photos into our top 20-25.
For a two and a half week trip to India across five cities, just the thought of it is overwhelming. Next!
3 – Digital photo display
Our oldest daughter graduated college this past May, and for our family graduation party, Scott curated ~150 photos across the years. We loaded it onto a digital photo frame that rotates through the pictures randomly.
The frame now sits on one of our living room bookshelves. I enjoy it every time it catches my eye. I can’t wait to do one for my youngest’s high school graduation party (next year!), and we could designate a separate digital frame for all of our travel photos.
4 – Souvenir gallery for our rentals
We recently took our favorite Costa Rica pictures and blew them up to 12 x 18 size to create a gallery for our rentals. We’re still in the process of winnowing out which are the best photos, and we still have to frame them.
We experimented with custom frames from an independent shop in Brooklyn and simple black frames from Amazon, and given how many pictures we need across three vacation rentals, we will likely go with the simple frames.
5 – Postcard collection for our rentals
We have already created postcards for our rentals. We leave these with guests to give them a piece of their Costa Rican experience to take home. The postcards also do double-duty as calling cards for our rentals!
We use Moo to create our postcards, and they always come out beautifully. We could keep adding to our postcard offering, but that only helps us with our Costa Rica trips – until we expand our rental portfolio to other destinations😊
6 – At-home gallery
The 12 x 18 pictures we plan to display in our rentals can also be used to create a gallery at home. I have a series of 8 x 10 framed photos of our kids, and each year that I got a new school photo, I would simply swap out one of the older pictures in the same frames.
We plan to do that with our 12 x 18 set of framed pictures – we’ll pick our favorite photos from the other trips and rotate which trip we feature. We could also combine trips but group by theme – sunsets, water views, animals.
7 – Stock photo business
Organizing the photos is not easy but it’s personally rewarding as you get to re-live trips and experiences. Scott has so many interesting photos that if he ever wanted to make his hobby professionally rewarding, we could look into uploading some of the shots to a stock photo service.
Photography is definitely a portable career option, and we are always looking to develop skills that give us flexibility to work remotely!
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How about you? What do you do with all of your travel photos?
We are Scott and Caroline, 50-somethings who spent the first 20+ years of our adult lives in New York City, working traditional careers and raising 2 kids. We left full-time work in our mid-40’s for location-independent, part-time consulting projects and real estate investing, in order to create a more flexible and travel-centric lifestyle. 
Financial independence and early retirement is not something we originally focused on, but over time realized it was possible. Our free report, 
