For the Love of Photo Books

I have posted before on photo books. I was in the middle of the hair-brained scheme last time I posted on them and I was a little frustrated. I want to tell you I have had a ton of compliments on how cool it looks. It is compact and has a whole year's worth of photos. This is coming from a girl who took 6,000 pictures last year. I really did not skimp because my thought was this is my family and what I would carry away in a fire. I do not want to skimp on memories. I have made two books for the last two years worth of pictures.

My first book I made was on Snapfish. It was very easy. My only complaint was that I had to upload a gazillion pictures before I actually got to drop the pics into a template. The uploads took FOREVER. . .probably like 10 hours. The cool thing about that is that now they have an automatic picture mover that you can download onto your computer. Anytime you plug in your camera to get the pics off it automatically moves them to Snapfish. This helps tremendously with the photo book process. The Snapfish book costs me about $60-$75 if I am remembering correctly.

I have also made a couple of smaller books on Snapfish. I made one for a friend when they were building their house. I just highlighted the beginnings and put pictures of its completion and their sweet family along the way. It was fun to give that to them as a gift. Also, I have made a small one for my family of our annual Florida trip. I am generally the "family photographer" and they need something to vouch for their time on the trip other than just our wild stories (more pics and stories to come on that).

The second book I made was really big, over 100 pages and I can't imagine how many pictures were included. . . .probably over 300-400. It costs me about $100, but like I said I did not skimp. The main problem I had with Blurb.com is that it was not intuitive. I could not make each page a different font and I am a font-fanatic! It was very basic, but what I liked about Blurb is that you do not have to upload your pics before you start working you just have to choose from the pics that are stored on your computer and it uploads the book at the end. That takes awhile, but when I am ready to work on my book . . .I am ready to work. I do not like to do all of the "pre-book stuff. " I did receive an email a month or so that they have upgraded their system to make it relatively glitch-free (although I have not tried it again yet). The other cool thing about blurb is that you can basically publish anything. . .cookbooks, your own book, anything and you can make a profit off of whatever you make. You can set your price to be whatever you feel it should be to include your time in making it, etc.

Well, that just about wraps up my photo book experience. Another one that I am interested in trying because it gives a more scrapbooky feel is picaboo. If you have any other ideas I would love to hear about them.

Don't forget to get back to Rocks in My Dryer to get some other great ideas and tips!!!