How do you store your summer-vacation photos?

Photo Credit: Getty ImagesAfter a few (very frustrating) years of struggling to get decent photos out of a less-than-two-megapixel digital camera about the size of a shoebox (felt like that, anyway) that drained its double-A batteries in minutes flat, I have finally upgraded to a camera from this millennium and am awash in digital files just waiting to be printed in all their full, non-pixellated glory. The best ones will get hung on the wall or framed on a shelf, but I'm not sure how I want to store the rest. In my space-starved apartment, I can't imagine clearing out entire bookshelves to make room for albums, but I also don't know if the increasingly popular photo-storage boxes really encourage perusing (and when they do, don't you get fingerprints all over everything?).

I do kind of like this set of clear boxes from The Container Store ($12), which at least lets you sort your snapshots into themes and identify and pull out just the ones you want (again, without getting your grubby paws all over all of them), but it's not terrifically attractive. Photo Credit: Container Store
Still, most of the prettier versions of photo boxes just have index card-type dividers that don't make grabbing the ones you want quite as easy. This one has archival-quality paper envelopes, but I imagine I'd probably just end up dumping in my photos in the drugstore's 1-hour photo envelopes.
Photo Credit: Container Store

And then you've got albums, and the question of whether to splurge on a traditional hand-bound Italian-leather version with acid-free paper, like this laurel-leaf embellished version from Kate's Paperie ($50)...Photo Credit: Kate's Paperie...or to make your own album with a patterned binder and some album refill pages. Maybe something like Russel + Hazel's allover-print mini binder series ($16).Photo Credit: Russel + Hazel

Comment Away: How do you store your family's photos? Or do you even print them out anymore?

Other ways to turn clutter into something darn near a work of art:
Old, unwanted books become floating shelves
Kids' piles of artwork become a frame-worthy collage
A handful of pretty projects for burned-out incandescent bulbs