I know how ephemeral digital photos are. I remember, as a child, pulling out the big photo albums every so often and flipping through the pictures of me as a baby, of my mum when she was pregnant with me. How sad, I thought, that Elliot won’t have that same feeling.
For nearly a year I’ve been trying to do a photobook on one of many photo printing sites. I have half-finished ones all over the internet. Either the upload procedure is a pain, or they weren’t very Mac compatible, or the layouts were weird or I would find out at the end the book would cost me an incredible amount.
Finally, I saw one of my friend’s photobooks and it looked brilliant. The printing was beautiful, not too horribly glossy, and the layout was beautifully simple. She pointed me towards Blurb. A tool for self-publishing, Blurb is quite powerful. I used the web-based Bookify tool, which easily hooked up to Flickr so I could grab my photos. When you already share your photos online, it is a royal pain to have to dig them all out again, decide all over again which ones are good, export and upload.
I made a 48-page book, hardcover with a dust jacket, premium paper (which allowed me to get a matte finish) at 25 x 20cm, and it cost me £30.38 including delivery. I could have gotten a softcover, without the matte finish and it would have been about £20 including delivery. That’s incredible for something so beautiful.
I can’t wait to make more and more of these to sit neatly on our bookshelves, ready for Elliot to page through when he’s a bit older.
That’s just beautiful. Paper is a clearly superior medium for some apps, and I know that you will be so glad to have that book “down the road.”
Definitely, it’s amazing difficult to truly lose something like a book of photos, compared to how easy it is to lose data.
I have got in the habit of printing photos every three months and then putting them in an album with little captions. I do love a photobook though and made some lovely albums after our wedding for our parents. I can get a little obsessed about getting it just right though. Yours looks lovely.
That is a good habit… I didn’t get as far as writing captions! I know what you mean about getting a bit perfectionist about it, though I found Blurb was the easiest one to just do it, their layouts made it easier not to go too far wrong.