I am a pretty obsessive shutterbug. As a photographer, I have a special kind of love for freezing moments in time, and you will rarely find me without my camera on any given day. I frequently fill up memory cards, and I have an ever-growing stash of external drives to store all my image files and keep them safe. But, as much as I snap away without a second though, one thing I don’t do as much as I would like to is catalogue and print my personal family images. That’s right, this full time photographer who frequently creates albums and photo books for clients doesn’t print her own photos. Why? Because it is so incredibly time consuming that can’t fit it in anywhere.
Unless you have been living under a rock for the last decade, chances are you know about Shutterfly’s super cute photo books. If not, you need to head over right now and look them up. Fun, right? Well they no have a “make my book” service that does the whole process of searching, sizing, arranging, and creating for you. This means that I don’t have to spend a week creating the perfect book – all I have to do is choose my theme, add a bunch of photos, and wait for my completed book to be ready in my account. From there I can look it over and make any changes I want to, order it, and it will show up on my doorstep! Seriously, where has this been all my life?
I would love to have a book for every year of our lives, with each book being a collection one year’s worth of memories. Since that would likely be an incredibly huge undertaking just sorting my images, I thought I’d start with the most important stuff: our family vacations. Specifically, Disney. We go every year, and I have hundreds of memories backed up on my computer from these trips that seldom see the light of day.
The make my book service costs $9.99 on top of your regular photo book price, and it is definitely well worth it. When I was ready to do my book, I uploaded all of our Disney images into my Shutterfly account, picked the size and theme I wanted, and then they did the rest. My completed book was waiting for me 3 days later and it was fabulous!
I love how my book was laid out for me, and with the bulk of the creative process done for me, all I had to do was go in and add personalized tweaks like phrases, our names, etc.
If you love photo books but don’t have a ton of time to dedicate to making them, I would highly recommend letting the folks at Shutterfly take the reins with the Make My Book service!
