You might be familiar with pre-vacation stress: last-minute shopping, last-minute cleaning, what about the plants and the pets? Do we have all the tickets, are the passports valid long enough? Do we need to be vaccinated?
I know, it’s stuff that should be researched after and planned for and I actually meticulously did. I have a control freak excel document to proof it. But that was a half year ago when we selected our travel destination and bought the tickets. And then… I let it all go. Until there’s only one week to go and everything has to get done stressfully. If vacation is for relaxation, the stress beforehand makes me sometimes wonder if it even worth it.
It is, of course. Our three-week trip to Costa Rica was amazing. The country is so beautiful, the people are friendly and the vibe is so laid-back that it is impossible not to relax. But returning home from paradise, got me in a new nervous breakdown. The photo book kind of nervous break down.
We took almost 2000 shots on our Sony Nex 5N, Sony action cam, and our iPhones. All these photos had to be imported and selected. Then edited. And then be put in a book for printing. Digital photography sounds so easy and so effective, but I actually miss the time where I brought my handful of Fujifilm film rolls (comprising a lousy 200 shots) to 1 hour photo service.
I would select the photos by hand, with no option of editing whatsoever. It was all Straight Out Of Cam back then. I would arrange the photo’s in a photo album and only then decide which one to enlarge. It would took me take me another week to wait for those prints, before I could finalize my album. With a sharpie, I would add some captions. All in all, it would take a maximum of 2 weeks  before I could look at my album with vacation photos. But it those 2 weeks were mostly about waiting.
- 1 evening of uploading all photos from all devices to our netwerk server
- 1 evening of downloading Lightroom and importing my pictures to Lr.
- 1 evening of selecting photos
- 3-4 evening of editing photos
- 2-3 evening of designing lay-outs and flow of the album
- 2 evening of writing captions and copy, and editing it in Lr.
Finkelstein & sons 
And that’s why my vacation photos go years without getting organized. (I have all these grand plans to make albums, but it doesn’t happen.)
I take the easy way out. I now take pictures as if I had to “pay” to take them so I either wait for a nice photo op or I take quite a few and immediately delete all the ones I don’t like. When I get home, I don’t have a lot to deal with. I too was tired of the post-vacation photo crisis! Glad to hear that you had a great time!
That’s a good idea! With kids though, a few photo’s may not seal the deal but deleting the ones that are useless sounds like an advice I can take up! Thanks!
😊