Organizing Our Neglected Wedding Photos

kolo album
I’m working with Kolo on a few projects to organize and print our family photos. Kolo is the premier photo album and photo book for professional photographers and designers, and I can totally see why. The quality is unmatched from any other kind of photo album I’ve seen (a true heirloom piece) and the attention to detail is incredible. I’m such a fan of their products. Perfect for a special project I had that was a long time coming: organizing our neglected wedding photos.

kolo album

I always tell people that I’m glad I got married before the era of design blogs. I would have been over my head in ideas and details, and stress! When we got engaged I bought a few wedding magazines and almost immediately became overwhelmed. I kind of threw my hands in the air and handed the wedding planning over to my mom with two simple instructions: a chocolate fountain (the new cool thing!) and a jazz band. I wore my sister’s wedding dress, the reception was held in my parents lovely backyard in New York surrounded by twinkle lights and tiki lamps, and a couple from our church made the cake and catered the whole thing. No stress, no pressure. I have no real regrets about not being involved in the planning process. I’ve never been that ‘dreaming of my wedding since I was 10’ girl. It was an incredible, wonderful day and I’m so thankful to my mom, family and friends that put it all together for us (and ended up washing dishes during the event itself).

kolo album

kolo album

Okay, so the only real regret…

I’ve treated our wedding photos in a similar way as I did our wedding reception. Without much planning or attention to detail. Which is okay for a party, but not for the memory of such an important and beautiful day.  For the past ten years until last week I had our wedding photos hidden away in a set of ugly clearance albums. We never look at the photos because the albums aren’t special enough to be displayed and instead they gather dust beneath my work table next to a package of (broken?) Christmas lights and a box of embarrassing photos from college. Organizing these wedding photos was a long time coming!

kolo album

Enter Kolo’s Hudson photo albums. Linen wrapped covers, canon printing, and the colors, oh the colors! I want to redesign our bookshelves around these classic colors that all go beautifully with each other. These ones in the photos aren’t even all the colors they have. I had the hardest time picking which ones to use!

Kolo offers traditional photo albums in a variety of sizes and also photo books where your images are printed straight onto the pages. Or! This part is cool: they offer a white glove service where your images are printed as photos and then inserted by hand into the sleeves so you can enjoy actual prints without doing the legwork of printing them and filling the album yourself. How genius is that? You have to handle these books to see the difference for yourself. The price point may be a little higher than other albums, but I’m telling you, they’re so worth it. I’m a huge fan now.

kolo album

How do you keep your wedding photos? Are they somewhere accessible and for display? (is that even important to you?). It never occurred to me before to make that a priority but I’m totally sold now on the idea of photo books and albums being part of our home design and not tucked away in a box somewhere. I have a lot of work to do to make it happen!

kolo album

Thanks to Kolo for sponsoring this post. Photography by Liz Stanley. Assisted by Sara Albers. Desk accessories from Itoya TopDrawer, one of my new favorite stores in San Francisco

Comments

If you want to capture your wedding and your beauty on it, then you will need to order a good professional photographer who will be able to make beautiful photos for you. Finding a photographer is not very difficult, but it takes a lot of time, find out more about FSquared Photography here. You need to review a lot of portfolios with photos, decide on the style of your future photos, whether you will order a love story photo shoot only for yourself or also want to take photos of people at a wedding!

I’m in the same boat – have been meaning to arrange my photos in albums in some sort of artful way but have never gotten around to it…for 8 years 🙂 the thing is that instead of getting digital copies my photographers gave us something like 1500 4×6 prints?! i’ll have to see if these albums would work with the prints. love the colors. thanks for this post – it’s motivated me to do something with those photos!

That is pretty awesome about your low stress wedding. Definitely not my experience but I wish it was! I’m going now to check out these albums for our wedding photos. They look lovely!

Really beautifully done Liz! Very inspirational. Time to get crackin on mine

I love the article and how you have displayed the albums! They are are truly works of art and have brought my bookshelves back to life! When company comes over they always ask about the Kolo albums. My photos never have to hide- I just reorganized a whole bunch of family memories not too long ago.

Great project and great post! We just introduced 7 new colors recently, and we had not yet seen anyone arrange them in the rainbow that you have. Looks gorgeous! Nice photography work, too. Thanks, Liz, from all of us at Kolo!

Wow beautiful albums! How wonderful, it’s so easy to forget to actually do anything with your wedding photos isn’t it? We’ve only just put our favourites up in frames and hung them. So nice to have them in beautiful albums too x

I’m a Kolo fan, too, and I agree, it’s so fun to have pretty photo albums that you want to show off! I sorta rotate our displays with the seasons, and this way, all our albums get enjoyed and shared with friends & family who visit. Wonderful way to keep happy memories alive, and we’ve found it’s a great ice-breaker at our dinner parties.

Wow, these albums looks amazing- I agree, beautiful colors! This might just be the motivation I need to organize our own photos

These are gorgeous! I have no problem with the higher price point, either. For something that will (hopefully) be handled by hands big and small for years and years to come, investing makes sense.

That said, I’ve been married for four years and only printed two or three wedding photos! I guess I paid for them, so I should print them. This is the result of getting married in college when we could barely afford it! Weird, arbitrary decisions about what we can/can’t spend money on happen when you are pinching pennies.

Ha! I agree. How I somehow rationalized not spending money on a professional photographer or nice albums I really don’t know!

I adore Kolo albums!! All of my wedding photos are digital and I have a printed/bound album for those but I did use a huge Kolo album for my honeymoon photos and I actually look at that album more. I think I should print some of my wedding photos and make an actual album, thanks for the inspiration!

Thanks Jess! I wish we had taken more photos on our honeymoon. It was in the Birkshires of western MA in peak foliage. What were we thinking not snapping away??

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