photo-related gift ideas

As you know, we are all about photos and videos here at Becky Higgins. Memory keeping is so important and really when it comes down to it, photos are pretty priceless. Some of our favorite people are sharing photo- and video-centered gift ideas.

From Brooke Samuelian of Brooke Allison Photography

Taking pictures has always been a true passion of mine and luckily I get to do it on a regular basis with my business. My number one passion though is family! I have 5 kids ranging in age from 11-3. Some of our favorite times are when we go and stay with their nama & papa a couple times throughout the year in Alpine, Utah. For me, one of the best parts of the whole vacation is watching my kids laugh with true joy as they play with their cousins and grandparents. My mother-in-law is so great at making lasting memories for all of the kids by planning fun events that the kids continue to talk about long after we are home. She does a family olympics where we start out with the running of the torch around the yard and then singing "The Star-Spangled Banner." We usually have 5-10 events that each family is in charge of putting together. It can be anything from a bubble-blowing contest, cartwheel contest, obstacle course, soccer, wet sponge throw at the dads (my favorite), and a dance off. We end with a medal ceremony and prizes.

I know how special these times are in my kids' and my family's lives and I never want to forget. So every time we all get together throughout the year, I capture it all on camera through pictures and video. Then when December comes around, I combine all the pictures from our family trips throughout the year and give each family a book. Then using all the live footage, I put together a video using iMovie for everyone to watch on Christmas Day. For me there is nothing better than giving them something that will bring back all those happy memories each year. It's definitely the gift that keeps on giving!

Lindsay Ross is a master of photo-centered gift giving. Below is one of her ideas!

Parent gifts can be tricky. My parents aren't easy to buy for anymore. I'd run out of great ideas and needed something new and meaningful to give them. So with my 6 siblings, we came up with a different idea for our parents.

I asked each of my siblings to choose and print photos they had taken over the years of their family doing things. My parents don't get to see many of the things we do day-to-day and they most often don't see the photographs of the vacations we take or the every day moments of our lives.

So we each picked about 200 photos and printed them off. The number of photos would vary depending on how many people are in the family and how many albums you want to fill -- we filled two albums and there are 6 kids in my family.

Each sibling mailed me their photos (we didn't all live in the same state) and I mixed all the photos together and assembled them using Project Life® Albums and Kits. You could also just put them in regular photo albums or print them as a photo book (or have each member make pages using the Project Life App and then assemble all the pages).

I chose to mix up the photos, but you could keep them together by family if you wanted.

This was a HUGE hit with the parents. It’s also fun to get the albums out when we're all together and look through the photos. It was fun for me to see all the photos of my siblings' families as well. This type of gift takes some pre-planning and due dates so everyone can get their photos printed. But if my family can pull it off, ANY family can pull it off. Assembling the albums took about 3 hours but would go faster if a group did it together.

This could easily be a recurring gift. Each year you can print out a new batch of photos and assemble them into books -- a meaningful gift that helps preserve and document the lives of our families!

Brooke Eliason of Female Foodie shares two fantastic memory-based gift ideas below.

A Photo Book. My husband and I are going on our second year of marriage and I am continuing a tradition of giving him a photo book of a chronological overview of our previous year. I make my books on my Mac because I love the big images. I am in the process of making one for this year to gift him for the holidays. This is something that could easily be put together in the Project Life App as well.

Video Interviews. Last year for Christmas I gave my family a gift I was really proud of. It wasn't professionally done or anything, but I recorded interviews with all of my living grandparents and shared that with the family. I put together all of the videos into one so they were all in one place. With just a smart phone, anyone can make this gift a reality!

For more photo book gift ideas, we recently filmed a Facebook Live -- you can catch that HERE.