Last week I was supposed to fly to Chicago to attend the funeral of a dear college friend.  I got sick right before the plane took off so did not end up going :(. As I was sitting around the next few days feeling sad I decided to document the photo gift I had created, and intended to give to my friend’s family at the service, before I mail it off this week.  

Here are the 5 steps I followed to quickly pull this gift together and find a little closure to this senseless loss in the process…

1 | Gather photos

The majority of my photos came from our pre-digital college days so this task entailed pulling oddly sized photos out of my photo albums. My kids were quite fascinated by these albums and asked questions such as “what are those (magnetic) pages?”, “how old were you when you did this” and “how did you have time to do this during college?”

2 | Label with Post-Its

As I was pulling each photo out of the album, I placed a numbered post-it note on the page.  I then added the same number to the back of the photo.  This allowed me to easily keep the photos in chronological order and return them to the album with no thinking required. 

3 | Scan photos

Unfortunately, I discovered at this inopportune time that my scanner was not working so I ran my prints up to a local shop to digitize them. Shout out to Audio Video Workshop for doing a great job on my rush project. They scanned at 600dpi so I was able to print even the oddly cropped images at a consistent 4×6 size.

4 | Print & mount photos 

Since I had to pick up medicine for a sick kid (yes, this is how I too got sick) I chose the 1-hour Walgreens option to upload the digital files and was pleasantly surprised with the quality. To mount the prints, I purchased 19×25 smooth card stock sheets from my local University Arts store and cut them into 5.5″ squares to fit in a 6×6 display box from Urban Outfitters (sold out, similar ones here).  

5 | Personalize 

I intentionally left blank space below my photo, like a polaroid, to add the dates and stories behind the photos.

Although this memory box gift was created as a tribute to the wonderful memories I shared with their daughter, this idea could be easily applied to many other happier events such as a special birthday or graduation.  I hope this small token of my love is meaningful and may even inspire others to print and share their photos with loved ones. Miss you, Jin.