PHOTO BOOKS!!!!!

I just finished up our summer 2012 travel photo books. Something I do for every trip we've been on since 2007 (some day I hope to make up previous years). Its super easy and pretty compact- so not alot of shelf space needed. In fact, we have ours sitting out on a side table. The girls love pulling them out and looking through them, reminiscing on past travels and where we hope to go next!

I LOVE this idea and wanted to pass it along to all of you! We use Apple since we have macs and all of our digital photos are in iPhoto. But I've used Shutterfly and Walgreens to make photo books and they are just as easy!

Step 1: Choose your photos- which should already be categorized by event or date in your photo program.

Step 2: If your using a mac...just click the book icon on the bottom of your iPhoto app. Drag the event or photos you want to use into the new book project. I usually do a medium plain photo book- soft cover. And I don't use captions with the photos. You can choose page layouts at the bottom.

Shutterfly and Walgreens are very similar except you would have to import/upload all photos to their site and then form the book from there.

Some have auto fill...and they can do it by date of the photo. So this comes in handy when doing a trip because it would autofill your photos chronologically. I had a coupon for a free photo book from Shutterfly (thanks Jeff!) and just made one for Evie's first year. That came in handy! It only took me 10 minutes to upload, design and order the book! Pretty sweet!


Its also nice as a way of compiling a years worth of photos for the whole family! They have tons of formats and design options- if you are more into the scrapbook look. We've used them for brag books for grandmas, birthday gifts (we made one for Gma Tillie's 95th birthday...complete with photos and 95 reasons why we thought she was super great!), the girls wrote a book and we scanned and imported their illustrations so it would could be in print...the possibilities are really endless. If you have an artist in the family (which we do!) its a great way to make a portfolio of their work! Just scan the artwork and import those scans into a book.

I love having physical copies of photos...digital has made it way too easy to just store photos as files tucked away on your hard drive. I like being able to sit down with the kids or friends and actually look through the book! Old school photo albums just take up way too much room and time! And photobooks are pretty reasonable in price. They run about $10 and up depending on if you have a hard cover and/or add extra pages.

Anyway...just wanted to share my love of photo books with you! This was in no way solicited or a way of advertising...I just really love photo books! Best invention yet!