Photo Book

SHE SAID:

For our first anniversary, we tried to give each other gifts in keeping with the traditional gift giving guide. Since your first year anniversary gift is supposed to be related to paper somehow, Brad made me a photo book from Apple of our first year together. It had pictures of our wedding, of course, but also different places we went and all of our “firsts” like Christmas, Valentine’s, etc.

Since everything is digital now, we’re less apt to take pictures off of the computer, get them printed and then put them in a photo album (seriously, when did people have time for that?). The great thing about photo books is their simplicity. All you basically have to do is upload your photos and wait for it to arrive in the mail.

As you know, we just came home from our winter escape from Florida. Coming home from trips can sometimes be a downer, especially when you go from bikini weather to parka weather. A fun way to relive all of the fun memories while you were away is to spend an evening together documenting it all. We put on a pot of tea we purchased from Disney World and created a timeline of our trip together. It was a nice way to transition from vacation euphoria to reality.

Photo books are a great gift to give and receive. You can have a lot of fun creating story lines to go along with your pictures and they look a whole lot better on a coffee table or shelf than those massive binders with plastic inserts.

HE SAID:

One of my favourite things to do when I visit my grandparents is to look through old photo albums. I like the ones that have pictures of things I remember as a kid, but I especially enjoy the really old black and white ones that give me a glimpse of my family’s history. After I’ve gone through a heavy pile of photo albums, I realize that it is far from a perfect system for storing pictures. The plastic pages stick together, the pictures are sometimes falling out of the slots, and all of the newspaper clippings and other random things being kept in the book make it quite difficult to browse the photos.

The best solution to the problem that I’ve found (unless you want to spend a small fortune on an iPad to look through your photos) is photo books where the pictures are actually printed on to the pages in the book. I used Apple’s service when I created one for Susan, but there are plenty of options out there. For Mac users, it’s as simple as opening iPhoto, selecting the photos you want included in your book, click on the book button in the menu at the bottom of iPhoto, then you just pick a template and fill it with photos. It’s very easy.

The prices for the books range from $5.00 to $50.00 depending on if you choose hard or soft cover, and the size of the book. The one I made Susan for our first anniversary was a large hard cover book, so it only cost about $30.00. The quality ended up being great. The hard cover was nice, and the photos (which were taken with our aging point and shoot camera) looked quite nice printed on the glossy paper.

Even if you don’t have a paper anniversary coming up, a photo book would make a great Valentine’s Day gift. It takes thought and effort to pick out all the photos and arrange them nicely. It’s a great way to share or relive fun memories.

For those of you who won’t be using iPhoto to make your photo book, don’t despair. There are plenty of options online to choose from. Check out these links and see which one works best for you. Black’s, Better Homes and Gardens, Costco, Carsand Mosher