Putting it All Together with OneDay.com

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This post is sponsored by OneDay.com. All opinions expressed are my own!

I know you usually come here for the recipes (and because I’m really convincing when I tell you that M&Ms are actually the newest superfood), but today’s post is a little bit more personal. I mean, it does still include some dessert (so don’t go running just yet!), but I’m going to be talking a lot more about me, me, me! than I normally do. Still friends?

About 10 years ago, I was pretty sure I knew where I was heading in life (and please don’t begrudge me my Cleaver-esque aspirations here): college, then marriage, then about 18 million babies in the baby carriage. That was my plan. I wanted to make hot dinners every night, fold laundry while watching soaps, and scrapbook each one of my precious photos in clunky books filled with cute stick-figure stickers… you know… glamorous mom stuff.

I was married at 19 (and 364 days) and graduated by 21. On track.

And then I blinked, 8 years went by, and when I opened my eyes I found myself with an online career, a schedule full of dessert recipes, and just the one, sweet (albeit sticky) 4-year-old.

Oh, and about a gajillion photos scattered across the internet.

My carefully structured scrapbooking plans somehow morphed into photos of different sizes and from different times on all sorts of different platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Picasa, and Blogger. And that’s not to even mention the photos stuffed into all the corners of my hard drive and the dozens and dozens of CD’s that are in a box around here somewhere…

As my life and plans morphed and changed and ebbed and flowed, so did my method of chronicling my life.

Back in ’06 when we got married, I kept my photos mostly on Facebook. Of course, at that time, printing out photos was still pretty big. So I have stacks of printed from that time as well. And I’ve held on to the CD of our weddings photos; it’s tucked safely away in a box under the bed with my garter and wedding announcement.

A few years later, just before we had Emma, we decided to be “grown-ups” and leave Facebook. And “way back then,” you could actually delete your account completely (not just deactivate it). So I transferred all those photos (some high school, college, wedding, and everything in between) to CDs.

But when we had Emma, I needed an immediate way to share photos of my cute bundle of joy with my friends and family. So I started a blog (on Blogger) and did a fabulous job of documenting our family photos in that way for a few years. Those photos are all backed up in the Blogger/Google/Picasa cloud-o-sphere for now.

Not too long after Emma was born, I started heavily blogging on Something Swanky. Which is when life got all sorts of crazy, and I all but dropped the family blogging.

But thanks to the iPhone I got for Christmas 3 years ago, I’ve still managed to patchwork together a photographic family history via iOS, Instagram, and getting my butt back on Facebook.

Can you see where I’m going with this?

On the one hand, I’ve managed (albeit just barely) to capture the important moments in my family’s life on camera. And it’s all still recent enough I can recall the dates and some of the significant moments here and there.

But the memories are starting to fade bit by bit. And the photos are scattered in so many places that it’s not often I take the time to look through them and just remember. Or show Emma our wedding day. Or tell her about the day I found out she was in my tummy. Or ask her what she liked best about our trip to California last year.

This is where OneDay.com comes into play. When they approached me about writing a post, I was immediately impressed with the site. It’s basically a one-stop shop for your family history. You can import photos and dates from Facebook, Instagram, Picasa, Flickr, and your own computer!

The photos are organized into one cohesive, easy-to-view timeline. You can sort the timeline by events that have to do with a particular family member only (like if I only wanted to view Emma’s photos) or look at your complete family’s timeline with everyone’s photos sorted chronologically. You can add stories and memories to each album and allow other family members to comment on them.

You can even create digital time capsules for family members to open on a specific later date. For instance, if I wanted to make a sort of baby/childhood album for Emma to open up when she’s 18 and going to college, I could do that on OneDay.com.

Or maybe if I wanted to chronicle events/photos that have been particularly special for me and my husband, I could store those in a capsule for us to open and look through together on our 50th anniversary.

OneDay.com allows for so many ways to currate, save, and share our family’s special and unique story. And best of all, we really don’t even need to change a thing we are doing– we can just keep snapping pictures and uploading to FB and Instagram, and then scoot them all over to OneDay.com.

I’m so excited to continue our story, with all of its future twists and turns. And I love knowing that all of our photos and written memories are all in one place that everyone in our family can easily access.

Begin your story today! OneDay is currently in Beta, but sign up for a free lifetime account up to 25G using the code “Swanky” at OneDay.com.