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.

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).

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!

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.

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!

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