Family Photo Contest and Gallery Wall

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll tell you about the family photo project that produced a beautiful photo gallery wall.

Okay -- this was a particularly strange Mother's Day with everyone in quarantine, but I came up with a fun photo-related project that I think we will continue annually despite hopefully not having the same restrictions on activities.  We almost always do some kind of a nature walk or hike for Mother's Day.  This year, I decided to combine that walk with a nature photo shoot.  I'll walk you through the steps:

• iPhone Camera/Photography Class - None of us have fancy cameras, but all of us have iPhones, which have pretty decent cameras.  The thing is, I've never learned much about the iPhone camera other than how to focus.  So, I found an online class through skillshare.com, but that is a subscription service.  This class not only had great training on using the iPhone Camera and all of it's features, but also some quick tips on good photo composition.  I'm sure you could find some YouTube videos that cover all of these areas.  So, I required my husband and 2 teenagers to sit down with me and watch the 30 minutes online course.
• Nature Walk/Photo Shoot - Next we went on a hike/walk with our cameras.  Our dog came along for the ride as well.  We all took lots of pictures using our new found knowledge of camera features and photo composition.  Each person had to take a minimum of 20 photos.
• Photo Editing and Submission - Once we got back, I had an optional training video that gave some tips on editing in the Lightroom app, which is free on the iPhone.  You could choose to edit your photos or not, but you had to choose your 5 favorite photos and submit them to me via email.
• Photo Contest - Then I set about making a photo contest for those 20 photos.  I wanted the photos to be in a random order so no one knew who had taken them and I wanted the voting process to be easy.  I signed up with an account through Pollunit.com.  Their free subscription allows you to create a photo contest with a maximum of 20 photos, so that worked perfectly for this project.  The free version also doesn't randomize the order of photos, so in order to do this, I renamed each photo with a number that I got from a random number generator.  Google has one -- I just set the range from 1 to 100 and generated numbers for each of the image file names.  Once I did that, I logged onto Pollunit.com, hit Create PollUnit, chose Photo Contest and filled in some of the basic information like Title and description.  I opted to do a star-based rating system with 5 as the maximum number of stars.  The rating average was based on how many people had voted so far.  Hitting Next got me to the page where I could upload all my photos as long as they were under 5 MB a piece.  So, I chose to Upload files, selected my files, and hit Next.  On this page I could choose a theme or very basic effects and advanced to the next page.  I didn't change anything on this page since most were premium features and then proceeded to send invites to my family to start voting.  You could handle this in a number of ways.  We decided to keep voting to just the 4 of us, but if you wanted it to be less biased, you could send it to friends or grandparents to do the voting.  Once the votes were in, I sorted the photos based on number of votes, so we could see the most popular photos at the top.
• Photo Tiles and Gallery Wall - Now we are on to how to display the winning photos.  We happen to have a big blank wall that really needed decorating.  I decided to do a gallery wall of some kind, but the thing I hate about photo gallery walls is the precision and tedium required to get all of the frames hung symmetrically.  And how crazy it would make you if even one picture was a little off.  But good news, I discovered that Snapfish has a relatively new product called Photo Tiles.  They are 8" by 8" foam tiles that are light enough to stick to the wall using magnets.  That is my kind of easy installation.  Not only is it quick and easy to do, its easy to adjust the tiles after the fact.  And the bonus is that the tiles -- although usually $9 a piece, were on sale for half price.  So, I ordered 2 with lettering to go in the center and then chose the 10 most highly rated photos to surround it.  The rule was that every person in the family got to have at least one photo up there, even if they weren't rated as highly, but that ended up not mattering since three of us got 2 photos each, with my daughter -- clearly the photographer of the family -- getting 4 of hers.  And here's how it turned out.  I love it!  Plus you can see that there is plenty of room for expansion as long as Snapfish continues to sell photo tiles.  

I can see us adding to this wall annually.  This may be my last Mother's Day with both of my kids at home since my son is a senior in high school, but I'd like to think we can continue the tradition, even if we aren't together.  After all, you can take beautiful pictures anywhere and the photo contest was already online.  

I've love to hear from you if you decide to try this out.  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!