Photo books... and I love a good deal!

I love photos!  I think I've said that before.  I love that I can share digital photos with family and friends through Facebook and through this blog and Brady's blog.  I also like printing out photos, though, and holding them in my hand.  For that reason I have been making photo books (using Shurtterfly) to give to Brady's grandparents for the past year and a half.  I made them last Christmas and then again on Mother's Day and now I've made more for this Christmas.  I have been very pleased with how the past ones have turned out and just placed my order for the new ones yesterday.  So, I thought I'd share what I made.

This is the photo book I made for MrKLB's parents last Christmas:

and the one I made for Mother's Day:

and this is the on for my mother last Christmas:

and the one for my mother on Mother's Day:

and this is the one for this Christmas (used the same photo for both this year):

Here are a couple of examples of the pages inside:

I order the 5x7 soft cover photo book for all of them.  Shutterfly has 2 ways that you can create your book: you can do the Custom Path or Simple Path.  I didn't realize it, but the past 4 that I've made I used Custom Path, where you add the photos to the page and select the layouts, etc., and this time I used the Simple Path where they automatically add all of the photos and you go back in and edit.  I like both ways but the main thing I didn't like about Simple Path is that you can't put a photo on the back of the book and you can't change the font or sizes.  There are clearly more options with Custom Path and I wish it would have allowed me to change from Simple to Custom along the way so that I could have made those changes.  One new thing I do like, though, is that Shutterfly will now let you pull photos from Picasa web albums so you don't have to upload them or have them already on Shutterfly.  That was convenient since all of the photos on Brady's blog were in Picasa and I could just select which ones to use.

I placed my order yesterday and was able to take advantage of 30% off photo books + $10 off + free shipping (on orders over $50) and saved a ton!  I put way to many pages in each book (like 65) so each one ended up costing about $30 (after 30% off) but then I got the extra $10 off and free shipping and ended up paying on about $50!  Not too bad!  (Of course, if you are better at selecting which photos to use and do a smaller book you can get them starting at around $12.)

I also just ordered my Christmas cards through Shutterfly and will do another post on that soon.