How Often Should Your Family Update Its Portrait?

There’s a framed photograph in a lot of the homes I visit that I can date within about three years just by looking at it.

The children are a certain height. Someone is wearing a style of glasses that puts the image squarely in a particular decade. There’s a backdrop or color palette I recognize from a specific era. And when I ask the family about it, they almost always say some version of the same thing: “We’ve been meaning to do another one.”

That photograph on the wall is often five years old. Sometimes ten. Occasionally it’s from before the youngest child was born, which means there’s a member of the family who has never appeared in a formal portrait at all.

I’ve been photographing families across Eden Prairie, Minnetonka, Edina, and the Twin Cities suburbs since 1983. The question I get asked more than almost any other is some version of this: How often do we really need to do this?

The honest answer is more specific than most people expect.

The Rule I’ve Arrived At After Forty Years

No formula covers every family perfectly. But after four decades of watching families change — watching children grow, grandparents age, family configurations shift in ways nobody anticipated — I’ve arrived at a working principle that holds:

Every three years at minimum. Every year if you have children under ten.

Three years is about as long as a family can go before the portrait on the wall no longer looks like the family living in the house. Hair changes. Bodies change. Children who were small are suddenly not. Relationships deepen in ways that show on people’s faces. A three-year-old photograph is already telling a partial story.

For families with young children, a year is the honest interval. The difference between a four-year-old and a five-year-old is not subtle. Anyone who has raised children knows that some years hold more change than any single photograph can prepare you for. If you’re in those years and you’re not photographing your children annually, you are already behind.

What Most Families Get Wrong About Timing

The most common mistake I see is treating a portrait session as a special occasion rather than a practice.

Families wait for a reunion. They wait until everyone can be there. They wait until the house is finished or the holidays are over or the kids are at a good age. And while they’re waiting, the version of their family that exists right now — unrepeatable, specific, exactly this — quietly passes.

I’ve had clients come to me after a parent’s diagnosis, wanting a portrait of the whole family while they still could. I’ve had clients come after a child left for college, realizing they had no real portrait of the family as it had been. These sessions still matter enormously. But the portrait they wished they had was the one from two years earlier, when everything was ordinary — when there was no particular reason to do it except that it was time.

Ordinary time is the best time. That’s a counterintuitive thing for a photographer to say. But it’s true.

The Events That Should Always Trigger a New Portrait

Beyond the regular interval, certain moments in a family’s life call for a portrait regardless of when the last one was taken.

A new child or grandchild entering the family is the most obvious one. The family configuration has changed permanently. The portrait on the wall should reflect who your family actually is now.

A child reaching a milestone age — five, ten, thirteen, eighteen — is worth marking with a formal portrait. These passages don’t repeat.

A grandparent’s health declining is a harder one to name, but I’ll name it. I wrote about this in the context of the last portrait of your parents, and the same principle applies to grandparents. If you have an older family member whose health has begun to change, now is the time — not later, not when it gets worse, not after.

Why the Portrait on Your Wall Matters More Than You Think

I want to say something about the wall specifically, because I think people underestimate what a portrait does in a home.

It tells everyone who lives there — especially children — who this family is. It says: we took the time for this. We thought we were worth it. There’s a quiet dignity in a well-made family portrait hanging in a home. It’s an act of declaration.

When that portrait is ten years old, it’s telling a story that no longer matches. The children in it are not the children in the house. The family has grown and changed and lost people and added people, and the image on the wall has stayed frozen in a moment that no longer exists.

How to Make It a Habit Rather Than a Project

The families who have the best photographic records are the ones who made portraiture a regular part of their life rather than a one-time event.

They pick a season that works — late summer, early fall, the period after the holidays when the light in the Twin Cities gets that particular quality I’ve always loved. They come back to the same studio. They watch their family accumulate a record over years and decades that becomes, eventually, something genuinely irreplaceable.

Some families I’ve photographed have three generations of portraits with me. Children who came to my studio as toddlers bring their own children now. That’s what it looks like when a family takes this seriously.

The calendar question — how often? — matters less than the decision to begin. Once you begin, the rhythm tends to establish itself.

The Gap That’s Harder to See Than You Think

Here’s what I want to name plainly, because I’ve watched it play out in family after family for forty years.

The families who end up with gaps in their photographic history — years where no portrait exists, where a grandparent aged into frailty without ever being properly photographed, where a child passed through an entire stage undocumented — didn’t get there through carelessness. They got there through the same small, reasonable decisions most families make.

We’ll do it next year when things settle down. Next year comes. Things don’t quite settle. Another year passes.

By the time the window closes — and it always closes, sometimes suddenly — the decision that felt like a postponement turns out to have been a permanent one. I’ve sat across from enough families in that realization to know exactly what it costs.

It doesn’t have to go that way. But it requires more than good intentions. It requires understanding the specific mistakes that let ordinary time slip by undocumented.

I put together a free guide on exactly this — “7 Mistakes That Quietly Destroy Your Family History” — because the patterns I’ve watched repeat for decades are predictable, and predictable things can be prevented.

Related Reading

• The Last Photo You’ll Ever Take of Your Dad
• How to Include Grandparents in Family Portraits
• The Best Time of Year for Family Portraits in Minnesota

If you’ve been meaning to make this appointment and haven’t, this is the part where I’d say: give me a call. Not to book anything — just to talk through what you’re thinking. I’m at (952) 400-1020, and I pick up.