Summer Instagram Bucket List

With May quickly coming to a close and summer on its way, I decided to come up with an Instagram challenge that will take me all the way until school begins again.  I had hoped to do a 100 Days of Summer, but quickly figured out that my summer is not NEARLY 100 days!  So sad!!  Instead, how about a bucket list of 69 prompts? (because that's how many I could fit on the page easily)  It will start the first of June and conclude right after I go back to school.  Feel free to follow along and join in the fun.  Use the hashtag #MTSummerBucketListChallenge.

I find that these prompts help me remember to take a picture a day.  When I first started creating them, I printed out the pictures and made mini scrapbooks.  But, recently, I have found a relatively inexpensive, no-labor alternative.  Chatbooks!  Chatbooks creates small photo books of 60 pictures from your Instagram feed for $6---free shipping.

I loaded my whole Instagram feed and I have the option of printing one, five or ten books at a time until I catch up.  Then each time you accumulate 60 pictures, they notify you and a new book is shipped.  Each page features the picture, the location and the caption that you used.

At this time, I am still playing "catch-up", but I love looking back through the books.  (that one on the far right was actually a custom book that I made before I figured out how the whole thing works. That one was labor intensive and I had to pay shipping on it.)

I have to give a shout-out to my friend, Pam Brown, for introducing me to another photo collecting device---the free Collect app. (Sorry, Android users.  I think this app is only available for iPhones at this time) It is a place to collect a picture each day, along with a caption, etc.  I have been doing it regularly for almost a year now and generally try to choose a picture that shows something about what is going on in my life so that it serves more as a "photo journal" than following prompts, etc.  It's very easy to use and stores the pictures in a calendar format so that it is easy to see if you skipped a day.  You can also set your phone up to provide a notification if you forget a day.

Although I haven't used some of the other features (which cost extra, I think), I do categorize my pictures with hashtags and just learned that I can back them up in Dropbox.  I've even seen several Project Life albums lately that use screenshots of their Collect photos because it provides a very clean layout with a caption.

Since I'm the only one that can see these photos, I can store photos of the grandkids here without worrying about them being seen on the internet.  I wish I'd had something like it when my kids were little---how cool would it be to have a photo a day of your baby's first year?!?!