Every year I make a mother's day book for my mom, gathering photos from all my siblings and compiling them in a Walton family album for the year. For the last three years or so I have used Shutterfly for convenience sake all the while waiting for a better solution before I started on my own yearly albums. Being a graphic designer, you'd think I'd just use InDesign, and I started to at one point, but Shutterfly has the convenience of lining up all your photos in chronological order so you can just drag and drop them onto the page. The only thing I hated was how limited the page layouts were. I wanted to create my own.
FINALLY! Shutterfly has a 'customize your own book' option where you can resize photos, add text boxes and completely create your own page layouts. I am loving it! Seriously, Chris hears about it all the time. It really has all the convenience of the original method and then you can go in and make the adjustments to make it perfect! I am having so much fun. I'm working on my 2010 album and it's so fast and easy, I've already started thinking about my 2009 and 2008 albums. I have to go back and fill in the years since I quit scrapbooking. Oh, and then a wedding album...
Anyway, I don't know how long this has been around and I've missed it or what other programs are similar or better, but I just wanted you to know. I am proud of Shutterfly!
5 comments:
Hey! I love smilebooks- it's what I use for all of our yearly family books- they're quality is amazing! They are a tad more expensive then Shutterfly, but I can always find 30% off coupons when I need one to bring that price down! Love ya!
Another great place is Mixbook.
mixbook.com
We made a book for my mom this year and it was great b/c you can invite contributors and each can add their own images/do their own pages but it's all in one place.
Soo good to know! Thanks for sharing. Blurb lets you design your own too, and now if you change your mind about what size you want to do, it will convert everything over to the other size. Got to love that. I have a bit of catching up to do. Maybe this will motivate me a little. Thanks.
Yeah. I love Blurb's print quality, especially if you use the premium paper. I haven't used their design program, though. I just used the pdf to print option and designed it in InDesign. I tested several of these programs a few years back and was disappointed with almost all of the them. I'm so glad they are all finally catching up to what I want them to do.
Is it really that friendly? Something I could actually do? I'll have to check it out! See you guys soon!
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