Our Family’s Picture Storage Solution: Yearly Photo Books
We’re working on hanging our new pendant lights so we’ll be back to share those pics in the morning. In the meantime, let’s talk about something people ask about all the time: photo storage. Ever since seeing Katie Bower’s family photo book two summers ago, we’ve been drinking the photo book Kool-Aid – starting with our very first Family “Yearbook” that we made last summer (you can read about that here). And now that another year has wrapped up, well, let’s just say this arrived last week:
It’s one big glossy photo book stuffed to the gills with all of our family photos from 2011. Except the perk is that while it has around 600 photos, it’s only about a half-inch thick. Which is awesome for storage purposes (way less cumbersome than thick overstuffed photo albums that only hold 100-200 pics each). We ordered it through MyPublisher and thanks to a promotion they were running for free extra pages, we got to max out their page limit (100) and pay nothing extra. The discount (which has ended since we received our book – but they tend to pop up pretty frequently) actually saved us $79! And we’d easily pay $44.99 to print all those pics (not to mention having to buy a bunch of albums to put them in) so a photo book can actually end up being quite the deal. And no, they didn’t pay/perk us to write this, we just like our photo books. Haha.
We did our last “yearbook” way after the fact (like mid-2011), so it took a bit of backtracking to organize all of the photos. But for 2011 we planned ahead and kept all of our photos in one iPhoto album (which automatically kept them in chronological order for us), which is why it only took a couple of weeks into the new year to actually get this one done. So let’s take a quick look through all one hundred pages… just kidding. We’ll just take a peek at some of the highlights – like our opening page that we edited to include some text to summarize some of the, well, highlights from the past year. We think we’ll love looking back on it (and having a summary of the whole year on one page).
We also tried to group big events, holidays, and milestones – like the several spreads of Clara’s 1st birthday party. Check out how dark our kitchen was in the bottom left corner!
We also used the preset page designs to give some really special photos the layouts they deserved, like the ones Katie B. snapped when we visited the Bowers in June.
And since it’s not hard for these albums to turn into a Clara-fest, we paid special attention to making sure Burger got plenty of love as well. He even scored a few dedicated pages throughout (every album needs a good Burger-montage or three).
We also thought it was fun to put all of the photos we took for our Blogiversary “Day In The Life” post into the yearbook in order. That way in 15 years we can look back and sort of remember what a normal day was like way back when…
We nearly ran out of pages by the time we got to Christmas (darn 100 page limit!) but managed to make room. Heck, we even squeezed in a collage of a bunch of our holiday card outtakes. Yeah, we’re kind of into our kiddos.
So since we’re on a family yearbook high – especially now that our collection is two albums strong! – we’re already excited to make the 2012 version.
But because that’s not possible yet (unless we want it to be 3 pages long) we’re thinking that we may try to organize our old digital photos and make one or two books that’ll hold all of the photos from 2005 (when we met) to 2008 (right before our 2009 album picks up). Maybe we’ll work on those books once a certain manuscript is in the can.
Oh yeah, and here’s our favorite photo bomber again, just trying to get in on the action.
Anyone else making photo books or albums to document the past year? Or any other event or period of time? We’d love to hear other systems people have for organizing and displaying their family photos.
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I would love to know what you think of the photo quality on these – and are you able to pull in your flickr albums, or do you have to upload them from your hard drive? I recently did this for my daughter’s first 6 months as a Christmas gift to our families, via snapfish, and I wasn’t very happy with the quality of the printed photos. Thank you! Love love love your blog!
It works with free software that you download so I don’t think you can pull them from flickr. The quality is awesome though. Hope it helps!
xo,
s
My brother and I pounced on the MyPublisher promo too! We are making a book of our 16 day Asia trip as a gift for my parents’ 31st wedding anniversary (the trip was to celebrate their 30th!)
The hardest part was fitting everything we wanted while getting some big full page shots in there, but you certainly nailed it!
Oh, I’m so copying this!
Love it! Thanks for the gift ideas for this year!
Mmm. Fantastic idea to make it a family yearbook. I had been planning on making one book per year of my daughter’s life, but making a family yearbook instead takes into account any family changes/expansions. Good idea!
Also, if you ever decide to pierce Clara’s ears, I saw these yesterday and thought of you guys… http://www.etsy.com/listing/74122177/phillips-screw-earrings?ref=sr_gallery_38&sref=&ga_search_query=children%27s+earrings&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_ship_to=US&ga_page=3&ga_search_type=handmade&ga_facet=handmade
Aw cute!
xo,
s
Funny, I just wrote about our photo book as well…great minds think alike?
http://www.fishlynews.com/2012/01/from-jpg-to-print-another-year-in.html
Haha- I love it!
xo,
s
I’m in the process of making photo albums of our wedding for my parents & my in-laws, but it’s much harder than I anticipated!
I love the idea of a yearbook! I may have to steal it :)
My grandmother was a crazy scrapbook keeper. She made 2 sets so each of their kids would have them. We still look at them – photos going back 3-4 generations. It’s great stuff!
How do you guys find time to do all of this! Seriously. I am in awe. I did a calendar for a my mom for Christmas and spent 4 hrs just on that! It had, like, 30 pictures in it, max! If I did this it would take me at least 20 hours. But you telling me that it only took you 6 does have me inspired… now that I think about it, a lot of my 4 hours was spent on cropping and editting red-eye. It was not fun!
It definitely helped to have all the photos stored in one chronological folder, so we just went through, picked our favorites, uploaded them and use preset templates (you just drag and drop) and did that a few hours a night for a few nights in a row!
xo,
s
LOVE it! Definitely got to jump on the band wagon this year! :) Did you design everything in iPhoto or use My Publisher templates?
We designed all of it within my publisher!
xo,
s
We love doing our “Year in Review” books!!! We use Mixbook which is oh-so-awesome because it gives it more a scrapbook type appearance and you can use so many different theme ideas and you can access it from anywhere (no software download). We started in 2009 with our fun leading up to wedding and honeymoon and then decided to keep doing it every year. I have also made one for the ongoing progress in our house (a before and after album to keep up with our work) and made a vacation one for my mom. We absolutely adore having these small, hardcover, and well-made books for our forever photo memories!
omg I MUST do this. thank you for the inspiration! I did a “first year” book for my older daughter, and have the photos in a folder in iPhoto for my younger daughter (haven’t made the book yet) but I really need to get into the habit of making a book per year for the fam.
That’s such a great idea. The BF and I are terrible at remembering to take pictures — hopefully that changes down the line!
I’ve also done this for our family since 2009 with MyPublisher! It is such a great way to tell the story of your family events each year. My kids are now 4 and 6 and they love looking through the books and reading about their lives! One year we gave each month a page of it’s own. January 2009 – then wrote the summary of what happened that month. The following pages coordinated with the story. We completed the entire year that way. I now take so many pictures and it is hard to decide which photos to include in the book and which to leave out, that I can’t afford using 12 pages of ‘story’. Now I typically split it up into 6 month periods! Jan – June and July – Dec. It is such a fun and challenging project for me each year. Now all of the grandparents order a book (I already have them asking for our 2011 book)! I order two copies for our house so that each of my children will have them once they are grown and out of the house! I love how you’ve done your books and glad that you’ve shared it with others. A lot of families don’t know what to do with their pictures if they aren’t scrapbookers! I’ve shared this book idea with personal friends and family and they love it! However…many of them have the callenge of how to begin organizing their pictures – which is a completely different project!
This is such a good idea! What an awesome way to keep your memories in such a glamorous way.
You said you use a Nikon D300, right? (I think I’m remembering properly) The pictures you take are just gorgeous and really look beautiful in the albums.
I’m sure Clara will appreciate the thoroughness in which you’ve documented your life :D
It’s a Nikon D3000 actually! Haha. It sounds straight from the future to me with that big number. Hope it helps!
xo,
s
I did this! I order through iPhoto and am always extremely happy with the quality of the books, and the ease and efficiency of ordering:) Our little girl just turned one, so I made a book of her first year (minus a few weeks) and gave them to our fathers for Christmas.
I love photobooks and I love scrapbooking….so I technically have alot of each with many overlapping topics. I need to learn how to cut back!
I totally need to do this for my wedding! We got married over 2 years ago, and I can’t bear to spend tons of $$ on a book done professionally by the photographer when I can spend under $50 and do it online! Thanks for the inspiration, your pages are beautiful!
I love My Publisher, I have been making “a family Year in review book” for the last 6 years with them and the software has really gotten much better. I like your cover, I have been sticking with the cloth covers to make ours all part of one group. I also make a special one for my mom and another one for my mother-in-law requesting photos from our siblings. It is a ton of work, but a much loved gift.
That’s pretty neat! I did one book of Eleanor’s first month of life, and we have one of our wedding, but I hadn’t thought of doing a yearly book. I figure my mommy blog is sort of like our online yearbook, but it’d be nice to have hard copies to look at.
Growing up we loved getting out my mom’s photo albums and looking through all the pictures, but this seems like way less work! :)
Eek! I love photo books! We use Blurb to make them – we made a huge one as our wedding album, and for a Christmas gift one year, I made a 400 page (yes, PAGE – not amount of photos!) full bleed spread of our photos from our 2 year anniversary trip down the California coast. It is so, so awesome to be able to have that forever.
Once you start laying out the design on one, it’s so addicting!
I also did a MyPublisher photoyearbook for 2011. For 2010, I did blurb, and MyPublisher definitely beat it in terms of quality (earlier I did winkflash, which was the cheapest, but last quality-wise). Love MyPublisher.
I did about $30 of extra upgrades (lay-flat pages, glossier photos, thicker paper), and will keep doing that for every book in the future. I also did every spread via Photoshop, and then uploaded full-page spread onto myPublisher. Love photobooks! =)
Oh, so since I did every spread via Photoshop, it took me many, many hours more (about half an hour for each spread, so 50 hours). But I did this over the course of the year, so it wasn’t too bad. Definitely makes the photobook more special though =)
I just finished one for our family for last year. It started 3 or 4 years ago, with a book about fun things we did with our grandkids that summer, but then, decided we needed to include ALL our family! So the past two years, it’s been a ‘Family Fun Times’. This year, I hope to organize and work on the book, as the year goes by. I found it quite overwhelming to choose pictures, plan layout, stickers, background for a whole year at one time. I’m proud to say that I started my 2012 book the other night! :) We just went to the circus together!! :) I use Shutterfly.
Love the idea of a Family Yearbook!
I’ve been doing a photo book for each of the kids’ birthday parties (I love finding pages & designs to go with the party theme). I also make one for each family vacation.
Hadn’t thought about doing a full year- thanks for the tip!
I’m thinking that in the future, I should watch for sales on them and get two copies made of each album so my boys can each have one.
Our wedding photographer put together a book for us as a surprise. It was great. He used our favorite wedding photo as the cover(it is my profile picture on my blog). I think we would like to go back and make our own so we can pick out pictures that are special to us. But it was so great that he did one for us. I think we may have to consider doing yearbooks because printed photos take up too much space and if you don’t print them they just sit on your computer and don’t get looked at enough.