You know that saying that the shoemaker's kids have no shoes? I tell clients constantly to make sure they print their images, and yet in my home life I am lacking. There is a reason for this though, I am overwhelmed. I take so many photos that I get bogged down when it comes time to print and I have so many favorites it makes it very hard to choose. Plus, where do I put all these photos? I only have so much wall space and so many frames. Well, here is how I solved that issue and get my images off my hard drive and into my home so that my kids can look at them over and over, and that is with photo books. Every year I print my family a photo book. I also will make them after a vacation if I feel it is needed. This year's photo book is a ridiculous number of pages with around 700 or so images. It takes forever to make these books and I try and use the autofill feature to help the book be filled in and then tweak it afterward so that it gets done. This year instead of waiting until March of 2018 to make my 2017 book, I decided to be pro-active and start my book and fill it in once a month as it goes along. I have chosen my favorite images for the month and then uploaded them to my book. This has helped me be way more organized and now I am not dreading making my family's yearbook.
So, what companies do I use for my photo books? Typically I will use shutterfly. While I HATE their prints, their photo books are printed really nicely. The book above was printed by shutterfly. I have also used Artifact Uprising. Their quality is AMAZING and I love the soft covered book I made for my vacation in Ireland. They also have amazing prints. If you haven't checked them out before, you should. I also have used My Publisher, but I believe they may be closing or have sold to Shutterfly, I am not sure. You can see the books I have made over the years.
One year I somehow messed up and you can see I have a blank white cover, no idea what happened but it doesn't really bother me. Also, I am not one of those people who have all their photo books the same size, but if that is something you would prefer you can certainly do that.
