7 Tips for Bringing Family Photos into Your Life

Family photos do more than show what we looked like. Family photos help us remember who we’re becoming. When the family photos you love are easy to see and share, they spark stories, invite connection, and make rooms feel like yours. A frame by the front door, a small album on the coffee table, a rotating photo on your phone—each is a gentle anchor: “These are our people. This is our season.”

Read our post on storytelling activities to use with your family photos.

At Stylish & Hip Kids Photography, we believe in the power not just of capturing your family, but of bringing family photos into your life as engines for story telling and to help solidify our sense of home—of what it means to be part of our family. 

Here, we provide 7 tips for displaying and sharing your family photos on your phone and in print. We offer ideas for easy printing that doesn’t require frames, as well as gallery walls and albums. Did we miss anything key? Shoot us an email if you’d like to share your favorite way to display family photos.

1️⃣ Install Photo Widgets on Your Phone. Put a widget on your home screen that displays a new picture every day. You can upload your SHK photos to an album and set the widget to display specifically from that album. We have multiple widgets on different screens of our iPhones: A featured widget that shows different auto-curated collections, a professional sessions widget, and a summer vacation widget—which displays pictures from an album we created with different vacations. It’s an easy, habitual way to see your pictures and start fun conversations with your kids.

2️⃣ Put Family Photos on your Phone’s Lock Screen and Wallpaper. Choose a few favorite pictures to put on your phone’s lock screen or wallpaper. And don’t feel like you need to stick with one perfect image, try changing it periodically—or seasonally—to keep things fresh.

3️⃣ Share Albums on your Phone with your Family. Make an album on your phone with a selection of your pictures and share it with grandparents or close friends. Update it periodically with new shots that you think they’ll like. It’s a secure way of sharing pictures and they can even set up widgets on their phones that display pictures from this shared album.

4️⃣ Display Family Photos on your Refrigerator. Refrigerators are probably our favorite spot for family pictures. They’re at the center of our lives, it’s easy to print and swap out pictures, and few things make a home feel more lived in than a fridge covered in family pictures. You can also display unframed prints casually on cork boards or magnetic whiteboards.

5️⃣ Print a Box of Pictures. Another informal way of having your pictures around is by printing a box of photos: shuffle through them, swap a few on the fridge, or use them in school or home craft projects. You can order a box of small-prints, which we’re in love with, directly through your SHK gallery.

6️⃣ Print a Gallery Wall. Choose a wall in your home and start building a collection of framed family photos. Walls that you pass by frequently are best, and entryways can be great as long as they’re not totally dark. Start with just a few pictures and expand outwards. You don’t need to plan the whole layout from the start—it can grow organically. We like to tile vertical and horizontal images using different sizes and styles of frames. The acrylic prints—which you can order directly from your gallery—look great in larger sizes. You can also go for a more classic and coordinated setup using matching frames. Click here and here for inspiration.

Read our post on converting family photos into wall art with large acrylic prints.

7️⃣ Keep an Album on the Coffee Table. There’s nothing like idly flipping through the pages of a photo album that’s been left on the coffee table, or which was brought out on a Sunday afternoon. Albums invite deeper dives into your pictures, noticing details, and longer conversations with your kids. There are lots of different formats and sizes for albums and you can print your SHK pictures or your phone pictures (just err on the size of smaller albums for your phone pictures). Albums also make amazing gifts for the grandparents (or once you design an album, grandparents can purchase their own version).

Want to work with us to capture your family’s vibe and make family photos part of your daily life? Contact us and let’s plan your family photo shoot.