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I designed and ordered my first photo book in 2013, a photo book of the pictures from a weekend spent in Hershey, Pennsylvania. We decided to celebrate our two year anniversary in the Sweetest Place on Earth. This weekend was filled with a Trolley Tour of Hershey, Create Your Own Chocolate Bar, a peaceful walk through the Hershey Gardens and time riding our favorite rides in Hershey Park. This was the first time we spent an entire weekend in Hershey, staying at the beautiful Hershey Lodge. But, what made this weekend extra special, and ultimately photo book worthy, was my boyfriend (now hubby) proposing to me! And, I love having a photo book that documents this memorable weekend in our relationship 🙂
Before I created digital photo albums, I designed paper scrap books for major trips I took. After graduating college in 2007, my best friend and I went on a Royal Caribbean Cruise together. When we returned from our trip, we decided to use the maps, brochures, postcards, daily newsletters from the cruise ship and, of course, our 100s of photos, to put together a scrapbook. We printed tons of our photos, purchased a scrapbook, purchased different patterns of paper along with fun stickers and embellishments. There were several trips made to AC Moore and, when it was all said and done, lots of money spent on this paper scrapbook of our cruising adventures. In addition to the money spent, a lot of time was spent on cutting, gluing and planning out each scrapbook page. This project required a lot of space. Space to lay out all our photos and supplies. We worked on our scrapbooks for most of the summer following our cruise trip. Of course, we put chick flicks on TV while we reminisced about each day’s adventures and bounced ideas off each other for the scrapbook page layouts.
Designing a paper scrapbook was fun and a great way to utilize all of those paper momentos saved from the cruise trip! However, it was expensive, time consuming and took up a lot of space when putting it together. Plus, after each day’s work, there was a huge mess of paper scraps and supplies to clean up!
One day, we were at my friend’s house celebrating her daughter’s birthday. My friend was a fan of photobooking, creating several, by this point. The photo books were out for friends and family to look through during the party. The photo books were broken down by year. My husband shared how much he liked the photo books. He liked how my friend created one for each year. He said he would love to see me do that with our pictures. Now, my friend, was an avid scrapbooker, even more than me. She had many scrapbooks she created while in middle school and high school. But she liked how much easier it was to create a digital photo album. There was less mess and minimal supplies involved. It was also something you could start, walk away from, and come back to at any point in time. This was a necessity for her, as she was a busy mom!
The first yearly photo book I created was for 2012, our first full year together as a couple. Now, this photo book was created and ordered a few years after 2012, but I was able to go through our photos and pinpoint the important events from that year. I took lots of pictures from our trips that year! It was a memorable year in our relationship because we traveled to Busch Gardens in Williamsburg and spent a long weekend down in the Baltimore and Washington, D.C. areas. I took so many photos inside the Baltimore Aquarium and Smithsonian Museums that it took some time to sort through and select the ones for the photo book. These pages used a 5×4 grid layout, holding 20 pictures. There are many layouts to choose from for each page and you can customize each page to fit your needs. In this case, I needed to use a layout that fit several pictures.
From this point on, I was hooked on digital photo albums and continued to make them for our big trips, for each year and for important events in our relationship (engagement, marriage, pregnancy & birth of our daughter). The photo books you create are saved in your project account forever, which means they can be reordered if something should ever happen to them. This is a HUGE benefit to creating digital photo albums!
Here are the photo books I’ve created thus far:
Yearly Photo Books:
2012 – A Year Filled With Great Memories and Adventures
2013 – Our Memories
2014 – Our First Year As Mr. & Mrs.
2015 – A Year Filled With Planes, Trains, Boats and Automobiles
2016 – The Year Our Family Grows
Trip Photo Books:
South Bethany Beach Delaware (July 2013)
Disneyland (November 2014)
Walt Disney World (February 2015, January 2016, November 2017)
Our Summer Road Trips (July 2014, July 2015, July 2016, August 2017)
Our Trip to Las Vegas (November 2015)
Our Carnival Cruise (December 2015-January 2016)
Our Major League Baseball Stadium Tour Book 1
Important Events:
The Sweetest Weekend – Our Engagement in Hershey (April 2013)
Our Engagement Photos
Our Honeymoon in Walt Disney World (2 Books)
My Pregnancy Journal
Our Daughter’s Photo Books:
Month 1
1-3 Months
3-6 Months
6-9 Months
9-12 Months
I use Shutterfly for creating my photo books. I am not sure why I chose to use Shutterfly. I think this photo website was a main one when I started my journey as a photo booker. My friends, who also photobooked and had been photobooking before I started, used Shutterfly. So, I just knew of this website. I know there are many other websites out there for creating digital photo albums. One perk of Shutterfly is that it gives you unlimited storage space for your photos and projects.
I collected Coke bottle caps for many years, entering the codes into My Coke Rewards account. I discovered these points could be redeemed for Shutterfly products, including a 20-page hardcover 8×8 or 8×11 photo book! This was a good deal and I took advantage. I never pay full price for a Shutterfly photo book. I take advantage of the various promotions offered by Shutterfly throughout the year, especially when they offer free unlimited pages. It is important to work ahead on your photo books and wait for free codes and promotions to come along. This way, you aren’t scrambling to put together a book. It will become overwhelming, add unnecessary stress, and potentially be a project that makes you unhappy. In my eyes, putting together digital photo albums should be fun, relaxing and full of joy.
I love taking pictures of my family, my daughter and my travels with the hubby 🙂 Digital photo albums give me a way to organize all these photos in a meaningful, yet creative, way. It probably would be easier, and slightly cheaper, to print photos and just stick them inside a photo album. However, the photo books include fun embellishments and “stickers” that allow you to truly customize each page. Photobooking is important to me and to my family. My family looks forward to paging through our most recent photo book, as well as past photo books. These books are a wonderful way to relive our travel adventures, Disney vacations and everyday fun before children and now after starting a family.
This post has inspired me to create some books from a huge backlog of photos! I need to set a goal to complete this before 2018 is over! Thanks for the tips and inspiration!
That’s great Tara 🙂 My goal was for readers to feel inspired to take action and create their very own photo books. You can totally reach your goals!! Just start with one category/trip/event at a time. When I have a backlog of photos or photo books to make, I will make a list of the photo books I want to make or important events. Have fun and good luck!