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Giveaway: $250 Artifact Uprising Gift Card

If you’ve followed my blog for awhile, you know I am horrible at organizing my photos. I take so many, it’s impossible to keep track of them. I don’t delete all the bad photos because I don’t have the time and I don’t put photos in folders by event, so finding a particular photo is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Or a pacifier in the backseat of a car while driving, to put it into parenting terms we can all understand.

To make matters worse, for some reason my photos have stopped uploading into iPhoto and started loading into Dropbox and no matter what I change in preferences, I can’t seem to get iPhoto to recognize my phone again. So, Dropbox it is.

Except Dropbox doesn’t have a viewer like iPhoto and everything is just in one big folder and I feel like there is no way to go back and find anything at all.

Also, I have numerous iPhoto libraries on different portable hard drives and I am getting to the point where once I transfer a library from my laptop to a hard drive, it feels like I am abandoning those photos forever. Precious memories never to be seen again.

I have reached PEAK photo storage. My laptop is full, my phone is full and I don’t trust iCloud. It’s a mess and it gives me heart palpitations just thinking about it.

As crazy as my photo disorganization makes me, it makes my husband even crazier. Because here is Mike, a total Type A super disciplined guy depending on me, a total mess, to document our life and family.

I take good photos, so that’s nice. But does Mike have any tangible proof of those photos besides what he sees on Instagram? NOT REALLY. And even though my Instagram feed is meaningful to me, I realize it’s full of stuff Mike doesn’t care about.

Does Mike want a sponsored photo about a diaper bag in his family album? No, he does not. When he shows his relatives pictures of the kids when they come over for a visit, does he want to flip through pics of my shoes on the street and my hand holding a cup of coffee? No, he does not. Twenty years from now, when Mike looks back at the time in our lives when our kids were young, does he want to see an aerial shot of the oatmeal I ate for breakfast one morning at a coffee shop all by myself? Not even a little.

The kind of thing my husband wants is a bound hardcover book with photos of our really special moments selected specifically for the purpose of preserving our personal memories and not just put out there for the Mommy Shorts fanpage. Something he can safely store in a wooden box with our family name stamped on it and treasure forever.

Something like the gifts from Artifact Uprising— a company created by two professional photographer sisters who were concerned about the “disappearing beauty of the tangible”.

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Artifact Uprising creates photo books, prints, and gifts for your digital photos, moving your stories “off your device, into your life™”. You can upload photos from your computer to their site or through an app on your phone and make the perfect gift for Father’s Day.

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Their signature products include premium quality photo books with interior pages printed on 100% recycled paper and a collection of wooden products handcrafted with mountain beetle pine.

artifact uprising photo gifts

Mountain beetle pine (in case you’re like me and had to look it up) is upcycled wood from the Colorado forests from trees that have already fallen. It also happens to look beautiful when made into a wooden box with your family’s name on it.

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I got a hardcover bound book sized for Instagram which made it super easy to find the photos I wanted to use, since you have the option to upload photos straight from your computer or directly from Instagram.

Even though my Instagram photos include a lot of photos of my lunch, it also includes my favorite photos of our family.

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I used the full res photos from my computer when possible but didn’t drive myself crazy. If I couldn’t find it, I just used photos directly from Instagram and figured I’d deal with the lesser quality. I must say, I was pleasantly surprised to find that in most cases, the photos from Instagram held up just as well as the high res. Looking through the finished products, I really couldn’t tell the difference.

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So, perhaps I have been organizing my photos all along on Instagram and Artifact Uprising can help me use that curation to create meaningful mementos my family can appreciate for years to come.

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Ones that don’t involve photos of my shoes or my food.

As delicious as that oatmeal might have tasted one fine morning in March 2015.

Artifact Uprising is currently hosting a promotion where you can receive 10% off on any order placed on their website before tomorrow, June 11th.

Today, I am giving away a $250 gift card to Artifact Uprising! Just follow the simple rules below.

GIVEAWAY RULES

1) You must enter your email into the widget below to win.

2) Then visit the Artifact Uprising Father’s Day Gift Guide and tell me the item the dad in your life would want most in the comments below.

Read the full rules here.

I’ll be picking one winner at random on Sunday, June 14th, which is the last day you can place an order to be received by Father’s Day.

Good luck!

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winner update

And the winner is…. Liz Terk.  Congrats! Please email abby@mommyshorts.com to claim your prize!

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This post was sponsored by Artifact Uprising, but all thoughts and opinions are my own.