Photobook

I placed an order for this last week and it arrived on Friday

It's a photo book of the last 3 years, I hope to do one per year from now on. I'd seen a lot of them around and saw a post over on young house love how they do one every year, but ones I'd seen here seemed expensive. This 100 page book would have cost just over £100! I got a groupon voucher though so only paid £29, for 100 pages of photos that's a bargain, next time if I'm only doing one year I probably wouldn't need so many pages and will look out for vouchers and offers. It's from photobox, I've also used them before for printing photos and they were pretty quick and good quality.

I started with some old photos and the one on the cover is also from 2009, I went for 2010 as a start point as this is when we got a decent camera, all the photos before 2010 are from phones and disposable cameras so there aren't many and the ones we have aren't great quality. I chose a handful of the best ones for the start of the book.

It was really easy to customise, I liked having some large photos and some smaller photos in different layouts

Or mixing up sizes on different pages

Even the smaller photos came out really well though and it's great to get so many photos on one page when they are silly photos from nights out etc that don't necessarily need a full page to themselves. Also as a tenant it's great having so many photos printed but not needing to find ways to display them in frames when we can't put them on the walls. 

The captions were also easily customised and I could change font, colour, size, placement etc

 I also chose the background colour, and will try and get future ones in the same colour as well

I did discover that 100 pages is actually a lot to fill so I added in some divider pages and some with only 1 or 2 photos on

It's really nice to have the last few years photos in one place and as it's a book it's so much slimmer than having all of those photos in an album and looks a bit more polished. Please excuse the mess on the table in this photo, can you believe we have to start brushing the cats teeth (every day as well!), we are just starting off and getting her used to it so the table is strewn with all the cat tooth cleaning stuff so we can just grab it when she comes up onto the sofa.

I tried to get it in chronological order but after being transferred between a few computers some of the photos had lost their time stamps but from memory I've tried to get them roughly in order!

I've really also tried not to just have holiday photos but also photos of day to day things, parties etc. We took over 600 photos when we went to America last year so it would have been easy for the whole book to just become holiday pictures, but I have a lot of those printed out already and in frames around the flat.

It was difficult though when we went to such a beautiful place!

The hardest part was actually getting the photos together, as I realised we had uneven amounts of photos, like loads of Graces birthday and not many of Olivias! Although Toms sister Becky kindly emailed us a load of pictures. We really just need to take more photos and this year I'm trying to take the camera out and about with me more.

This project also found the end of my patience with our old desktop computer, I had to use it because all of our photos are stored on there but it's so hopelessly out of date that it just couldn't run the photobox website half the time, once I had the photos I wanted loaded onto the site (which took me literally days) I worked on my netbook but every now and then realised I had forgotten one and had to go back through the very lengthy process of trying to upload more. All sat at our very unsuitable desk (You can't get your legs under it and the chair doesn't tuck in so you end up slumped over to reach the keyboard) on our mangled old office chair. So we might be getting a new computer sooner rather than later, if I had my way it would have gone out the window that day!

I think it was worth the stress and the back ache any way as we got hundreds of photos printed for under £30 and the book looks great! I was really impressed with the process of putting it together once I was on a working computer, it really is easy just to drag and drop photos into spaces, choose the layouts and add any captions etc.