Source: DepositPhotos

Ask yourself, what is the most important part of a family holiday? Spending quality time with your loved ones should immediately come to mind when you are dreaming about that family vacation.

When you return home after these ‘memory making’ trips, thoughts often turn to how best to document these moments. We now live in a golden age of photography. Whereas twenty years ago people needed to take a separate DSLR or decent compact camera with them if they wished to take beautiful photos on a trip, now the vast majority of us can pull out a smartphone and take a photo of staggering quality in the blink of an eye.

Showing off these photos, however, can often be a rather benign experience. Throwing them on Facebook is all well and good, but isn’t there a better option out there that will showcase your trip in a far more elegant way? What about those of you who either don’t have a Facebook account or are a little worried about just how your data is used by the big social media companies? Those of you looking for answers to these questions, read on.

Keep those photos safe

One of the first issues to deal with when it comes to vacation pictures, is where to store these precious memories.

Happy snappers out there will know only too well how quickly your phone memory can fill up when you are trying to get that perfect picture in front of the Eifel Tower or Buckingham Palace, so before you set off on your adventures, look into a storage solution such as pCloud.

Source: pCloud

Having somewhere to upload your photos and videos not only frees up your internal phone storage, but this sort of redundancy also means that you have an insurance policy against damage or theft. pCloud is a particularly good choice as you are given 10GB free to begin with, have access to a gargantuan 2TB of storage with a relatively cheap one-off payment (virtually unheard of in the storage space world).

It also allows families to auto-upload photos into a shared folder straight from their smartphones, taking the organisational aspect of returning from a family holiday out of your hands!

Get creative with your slideshow

When it comes to actually creating a slideshow of your holiday, there are plenty of options out there, but Icecream Slideshow Maker is free, and one of the easiest to get to grips with.

With support for all the major file types, the ability to change transitions between individual photos (some rivals only allow one type of transition for each slideshow), and an easy to use soundtrack option, making a stunning looking reminder of your vacation couldn’t be easier.

Source: Icecream Slideshow Maker

As mentioned before, there are other options out there that can do more than this particular slideshow creator, but when it comes to free options Icecream Slideshow Maker is hard to beat.

Whether you want to burn your slideshow to a DVD and send it to friends and family who are less technically savvy, or present it on your 4K TV to visiting guests (yes you can render slideshows up to 3840×2160) your entire set of needs are covered.

Emotive music adds some flavour

Silent slideshows are fine, or if you are personally showing your friends the slideshow yourself perhaps you are happy to simply select a song from Spotify that suits the mood to play in the background, but nothing quite beats that specially selected track that has been chosen specifically for your slideshow.

Not only can you time transitions in your slideshow to work perfectly for different moments in a song (for example, certain pictures work better during the crescendo of a particular track), but you can also really add to the emotion that your already personal video should invoke.

So how do you add those magical tunes to your slideshow? Select a tune from a royalty-free website such as AudioLibrary, and you are good to go. YoutTube itself has a music library of royalty-free music, so if you happen to be uploading your slideshow to the world’s biggest media site, their own catalogue is a great place to start selecting the perfect track.

Source: AudioLibrary

Wrapping up

So before your next family vacation, take a minute to plan how you will enjoy these memories for the years and decades to come. If a picture really is worth a thousand words, making a slideshow is surely the equivalent of writing a novel with your memories. Back them up, edit them, and give provide them with the perfect audio accompaniment. Your future self with thank you later!