8 ways to keep your travel memories alive

1. Create a photobook 

One of the best ways to preserve your travel photographs is to create a photobook. Gone are the days of having to print out each photo individually and stick them in an album by hand. Now, with sites such as CEWE, you can create your own book of personal travel memories in a few simple clicks. You will have control over the layout and size of the photos as well as the overall theme running through the book. These look great on bookshelves and on your coffee table. 

Before starting to design your photobook, think about what you want the finished product to look like. CEWE, for example, offer six different types of paper – what you choose depends on the type of photos you've taken. Gloss photographic paper can be great for adding depth to your travel photos and for bringing out vibrant colours. Matt paper, however, leaves you with a crisp, high resolution photo with a smooth finish.

You also need to decide on a size for your photobook. Perhaps you can create a large one for your coffee table and have some smaller books produced to give to all of your travel companions? The last decision to make is the cover. CEWE offer soft, hard, leather and even linen covers. Whichever you choose, your travel photos will always be kept safe inside, meaning you can flick through the book and reminisce for years to come. 

2. Send personalised postcards to yourself

If you’re going travelling for a long period of time and are planning on visiting multiple countries, it can be difficult to remember some of the details of the earlier parts of your trip. One way to keep the memory of the entire trip alive is by writing postcards to yourself. Transform your photos into a postcard, write your favourite things about the day in the image on the back and send it to your address. 

When you arrive home months later, you will be welcomed by a flurry of postcards on your doormat. Put the kettle on, snuggle into the sofa with a cup of tea and read through your personalised postcards and you will be looking back at your trip the very minute it’s over.

3. Create a photo calendar

Make sure your travel memories stay fresh in your mind for the year after your trip by creating a calendar. This way, every month you can flick to a fresh photo. With CEWE, you can even choose which month your calendar starts from, meaning you can create it and use it as soon as you get back from your travels, no matter what time of year it is.

Before setting out to create and personalise your calendar, think where in your home you want to hang it. An A4, A3 or square design can work perfectly in the kitchen to organise the whole family. A year planner can be useful for keeping everything in order in a workspace. If deciding on twelve photos is too much of a hard choice, then maybe you’ll decide on multiple calendars in different rooms, or a calendar with lots of photographs for each month.

4. Create a 3D scrapbook

Travelling often results in your bag being stuffed full of receipts, leaflets and tickets. Instead of throwing these away, save them for a scrapbook. When you get home, you can buy a big, blank book and paste plane tickets, cut outs of maps from leaflets, restaurant receipts and whatever else you may have alongside prints of your photos. This will illustrate your story further and bring back more memories than just the photographs alone. 

Which book you decide to use for this project depends on how you want to approach it. You could create lots of little scrap books for individual trips, or you can choose an enormous blank book to add to every time you return home from a new place. If you do this, it might be nice to paste a tick list of your bucket list destinations on the last page, which you can tick off as you work your way through them.

5. Make sure you can see your photos when you’re out and about

Your travel photos don’t have to just be displayed in your home. Transform the shots that most make you smile into key rings, phone cases and even have them printed onto your debit card. That way, you can be reminded of your trip when you’re out of the house.

Similarly, you can brighten up work with personal photographs. Have a photo of your favourite view in the world put on a mouse mat or a picture of you and your travel companion on a mug for when you have a tea break at work.

6. Write your own travel blog

Challenge yourself by using your most beautiful travel photos to illustrate an online blog. Have a look through some pictures of a certain experience you went on, such as trekking to Machu Picchu or going on a safari in Africa. Once you have chosen the photos, you can start to create a narrative around them, using the images to help jog your memory.

A useful thing to remember when writing a travel blog is people aren’t interested about what happened to you on the trip. Don’t focus your writing too heavily on yourself. Instead of telling people how you felt, tell them specific details about what you could see, what you could smell, the sounds and the tastes. The same goes for photos. Don’t litter you blog with selfies. Instead display photos of the scenery, wildlife or buildings. Ask yourself if you think your photos will inspire other people to go there.

7. Share your travel shots on Instagram and inspire others 

Set up a separate Instagram account for your travel snaps and join a growing community who share their photos from around the world to inspire others to embark on their own adventures. There are some important things to remember if you want your Instagram profile to gain a solid following. Find out what makes you unique in the travel world. Perhaps you love anything adventurous, or maybe you have a good eye for catching wildlife on camera. Whatever your niche, be sure to use it to its full potential and keep it consistent.

You also need to consider your tone of voice and make sure that remains the same throughout your account, too. Interact with your audience by asking them questions in the captions and replying to their comments. And most importantly, your Instagram grid needs to be eye-catching. Apps such as Planoly and Unum can help you plan out how your posts look alongside each other in advance, so you can create a visually stunning and seamless visual storyboard from your travel photos. 

8. Decorate the walls of your home with your adventures

Instead of printing your photos yourself and putting them in photo frames, have your favourite travel snaps made into beautiful pieces of art and make them the centrepiece of the rooms in your house. Before getting these printed, think carefully about where you want them to go and how big you need them to be. You might opt for one photograph stretching the entire length of the wall, or may decide a collage of smaller prints fit the space nicer.

You also need to decide what to have your travel photographs printed on. CEWE offers a variety of options. Their classic canvas prints are good if you want something that suits any room in your house and fits in with changing styles. The canvases are always printed in rich, vivid colours and are of high quality, so you can treasure it for the rest of your life. Another option is to have your travel photo printed on sleek and modern acrylic glass. What makes these prints so special is the way light is able to pass through the back and sides, brightening the colour and detail of your photo and lighting up the room where you choose to hang it.

Feeling inspired by our travel photo ideas? 

Start printing your travel photos now with CEWE. They have won the award for 'Best Photo Print Service Worldwide' from the Technical Image Press Association three times, have a 100% Satisfaction Guarantee and are sustainably certified, meaning you can be sure that anything you decide to have printed with them will be done in a carbon-neutral process. They are also the company behind the CEWE PHOTOBOOK, which is Europe's number one photobook with more than 50 million copies sold.

Start designing your own CEWE PHOTOBOOK now