You may be grounded for the time being, but you can still get creative and share photos from past ... [+]
Although any trips in the near future may be put on hold, you can still experience the joy of travel by rediscovering the places you’ve traveled before through photography.
Travel Writer, Photographer and Author Lebawit “Lily” Girma confessed that it’s a confusing time to be envisioning far-away places—Coronavirus is a scary reality we’re faced with. But there is a way to remain respectful and sensitive of that while also satisfying wanderlust—from the comfort of home, of course.
“It helps to go through photos and think of the moments that you actually learned something,” she advised. “We all have those moments that stay with us because they surprise us and we learn something about ourselves or about somebody else. Right now a lot of families are also home and learning together and getting through this together, and photography is an amazing tool for that.
“Not only can the educational component help people distract themselves, but it can also inspire them to, next time, take a meaningful vacation and focus on activities that are cultural and immersive.”
So while you await the moment you can book your next trip, you can savor the joys from your previous vacations and what made them so special. Whether you simply want to flip through the photos from your last trip or print them off in a creative way, here are four ways to rediscover your past travels through the photos you took.
Share Your Pictures Beyond Instagram
Instagram costs nothing and offers an easy way to share travel photos with family and friends, although it doesn’t really give you options to stay organized or back up your photos. It’s a fun social media app, but if you have pictures from past trips sitting on your SD cards still—and an itch to travel somewhere—then consider tackling both of those problems at once. You may know Adobe Lightroom as photo retouching software, but it doubles as a cloud-based service which lets you tweak and share your photos (including information like captions and the location on a map). Since you can do everything from lighten a photograph, arrange groups of pictures or share items, it makes getting organized with old travel photos an enjoyable, intuitive process.
Have a travel photo you love? Consider making a puzzle out of it.
Create Your Own Jigsaw Puzzle
If you’re self isolating and staying at home, have you noticed your screen time increase? Between binge-able shows to going down the rabbit hole of reading the news on Twitter, it’s a challenge to pry ourselves away from our television sets or smartphones. You may have put your last puzzle together in middle school, so rediscover the soothing act of patiently searching for just the right piece and creating something tangible. Whether it’s a photo of the whole family in Times Square just before your first Broadway show together or the awe-inspiring natural scenery of a place like Cliffs of Moher or Iguazu Falls, you can admire it in a photo gallery puzzle made from 60 pieces to over 1,000 pieces.
Get Old School With (Almost) Instant Photos
There’s something entrancing and nostalgic about the old Polaroid photos from your parents and grandparents, and the success of instant cameras like the Fuji Instax only emphasizes our desire for something a bit retro-future. You can get that satisfying result—the white-bordered photo which develops right in front of your eyes like pure magic—without having taken an instant camera on your travels, though. With a printer like the Fujifilm Instax Mini Link, you can use Instax Mini film and connect to the device through an app on your phone, printing off photos from any of your past trips. They’re easy to pass around and share around the dinner table, or you can organize them in an album for when you want to flip through the pictures with your own two hands.
No instant camera? No problem. Get a small printer that uses the same film to print off your ... [+]
Create A Coffee Table Book
Photo books today have upped their game. Far from the kitschy designs and templates you might envision, you can instead create a travel memory book that is just as much a reminder of a favorite trip as it is a family heirloom or work of art. Sites like MILK Books and Papier provide timeless templates, and all you have to do is provide the photography. If, instead, you’d like to share your Instagram favorites in physical form, try Chatbooks since they’ll pull pictures from your Instagram feed (or other sources, if you so wish). It makes it incredibly easy to share the best of the best from your archives. While you’re at it, take a look at their ongoing photo book series—it will automatically create a photo book for you every 60 photos in your timeline, so when you do start traveling again you can enjoy your memories in book form without even having to think about it.
Theresa Christine is a freelance travel writer based in Los Angeles, CA. You can follow along with her adventures by subscribing to her newsletter Delve here or listen to her travel and feminism podcast, The Wild and Curious Podcast.
