Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Photo Books

I'm a scrapbooker. I love scrapbooking. I have my entire life from 6th grade to the present documented. I know how much I'll treasure my books in the future. I just feel like I really have my life together when I have everything accounted for in my scrapbooks. It makes me feel so organized and I hope that my children and grandchildren will treasure them in the future as well. Sometimes, though, I just have too many pictures to cut and paste from single events. To remedy this problem, I started ordering photobooks online for when we go on trips. What I do is I scrapbook a page or 2 or maybe 3 in my actual scrapbooks with misc memorabilia (name tags, post card, a few favorite pics, etc) to let myself know that that trip goes there on the timeline. To prevent having to print 250 pictures and scrapbook them (that'd take a lot of time and a lot of pages), I just order them online. Also, this way I don't have to weed out my very favorite pictures like I'd have to if I were cutting and pasting. I can add as many pictures as I want to a page and customize it without the tape and mess! Who knows, I may go entirely digital eventually. This IS the 21st century. For now, however, this method is working wonderfully for me. I normally order my photo books from Walgreens. I ordered my wedding photos via a Walgreens photo book as well as our honeymoon trip to NYC and our San Francisco 1 year anniversary trip. I even have a little photo book of our current house. I'll make one of those for every house we live in. It'll be nice to go back and remember each house in pictures (before and after pics included). People normally don't take pictures of their houses. I want to see how the styles and my taste changes over the years.

Getting back on track, I took my little brother's senior pics last month and I ordered them as a Walgreens photo book. I did the 1-hour in-store pickup thing. It looked awful. You could see the print lines on the pages and the very last page had huge writing on it with my name and the order number and a bunch of other useless information. I was giving it to my mom as a gift and I didn't want all of that stuff there. I was just really unimpressed for the first time. I didn't have that problem when I had them printed on Walgreens.com and delivered, however. Maybe it was just the in-store order that made it look bad. Luckily their customer service is great and they gave me a full refund. I then ordered the book again on Shutterfly. It shipped really quickly and looks incredible. The quality is great. I was really impressed and my mom loved it. I will now order all of my photobooks from them. Be sure to look at the coupon codes online before placing your order. My favorite online coupon-code website is RetailMeNot.com.

All that to say, below are my Shutterfly books that I made of our Disney trip, my brother's senior pictures that I took in May, our engagement pictures, and our wedding pictures. They each took a few hours to a few days to make (I designed every page myself) but they were worth it. The prices aren't too bad. It'd cost way more if you bought an actual scrapbook, bought the supplies to make it, and printed every picture. I really love how they turned out. I'd also like to point out that I get no reward or anything for mentioning any of the sites above. This is my honest review of them.