What to do with In-Home Family Photos

A family photo session at home where everyone is just playing and being themselves sounds so relaxed and awesome, you say. But won’t they be too casual to print and hang? How can you put those to good use afterwards?

Well, my dear, I’m glad you asked! What can you do with documentary or lifestyle photos that aren’t traditional, posed photos?

Here’s the secret, you can do the same things with these that you do with traditional photos. Except here’s the thing: you’ll probably care more about these photos in 10 years than you do the perfectly posed, traditional photo in the middle of a field or park where you don’t spend any amount of family time and don’t have any connection or memories tied to that location. But here are a few suggestions, just to get the wheels turning:

Hang them in weird places.

These are versatile photos, because they’re photos of your real life. You can print photos from your non-traditional session and hang them in non-traditional spaces. Think: baking in the kitchen photos (or baby’s first taste of a certain pureéd food), printed and hung in the kitchen. Or: a big print of the family piled on the bed together, hanging over the same bed. It’s super meta. And it’ll remind you of what your home is capable of - holding so much love and laughter within your walls.

Put them in a book.

Do you struggle to print the photos of your every day life at the end of every year? mhm. Me too. But you know what’s super easy to do with the photos from your in-home family session? Tell your photographer to print them in a book. And then wait for the book to arrive. And then put it on your shelf so that you can look at it whenever you want. And if you do it again next year, you can get your photographer to make a second book. And suddenly you’ll have a little library of the fun ways your family spends time together. With the added bonus of you being in the photos too. And you didn’t even have to do anything to get that done. (Crazy.)

Put them on holiday cards, etc.

What sort of ways do you use posed photos? You can do the same with unposed photos! There’s no law that says your holiday cards have to be perfectly posed, and I’d even argue that a peek into your daily life would be much more interesting for the people receiving their one annual piece of mail from you. Similarly, photos of your family enjoying time together would be great additions to your kids’ rooms, so those happy photos are the first things the kids see when they wake up in the morning and the last thing they see at night before bed.

If you need help deciding how to use your photos after a session, I’m happy to help you decide. The digital image collections I offer include a hefty print credit to encourage you to get your photos off your computer and onto your walls, and I want to help you find the best ways to do that. If you need another argument for why you should print your photos, here’s one about boosting your kids’ mental health.