As most of you know, last Monday I wrapped up day 365 of taking a photograph a day for 365 days. It wasn’t always easy, some of my pictures were pretty boring (I have several snaps of whatever book I was reading on whatever days — not all days are interesting!) but some of my photographs I was (and AM!) tremendously proud of.
Midway through the project, I purchased a mini 8 x 8 photo book from Shutterfly, filling it with the photos I felt to be my best to that point. There were pictures of my daughters, pictures of the sunset, pictures of my grandpa. When I received my 8×8 book, I was stunned not only by the quality of the book – but just how much it pleased me to have my photos printed and bound in this pretty little book.
So, I knew that definitely when I completed day 365 I was going to want every day of photographs in a book. That’s right: ONE BOOK, 365 pictures.
A week before the last day, I started compiling my pictures in Shutterfly. The story board format was so incredibly easy to use – I’d choose which pictures I wanted on each page, and then when I was done, Shutterfly would decide the best layout for the photos. If I didn’t like the layout they had chosen, I could select a different one.
EASY.
I was so terribly excited to have all my pictures in one place, and that I’d be receiving them in a book – and then when Shutterfly asked me to do a review, I was glad to – because I was already prepared to buy this book – it was, in fact, already in my shopping cart waiting for me to click “Purchase”. I was already familiar with the ease of use of their photo book system, and the quality of the product. How often do you get the opportunity to talk about a brand you ALREADY LIKE?
There are so many cover choices! I chose this funky polka dot pattern because I thought it was fun, and it featured tons of my favorite color (green!). I was able to drop in a cover image (picking this image was difficult – and to be honest, picking one photo out of 365? That was the HARDEST PART OF THE WHOLE THING!).
The above is an example of a two page spread – I opted for an 8 x 11 book – and for the most part chose to put four images on each page – and last night, as I flipped through the pages, I was able to watch my year go by, photo by photo and page by page. The little memories I had forgotten about (the bird stuck in my garage, the elephant ear at the homecoming football game, the shortlived flowering season of our rhododendron plant), all on pages for me to treasure forever.
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Very nice, I wanted captions and dates with my photos (not sure if you have that or not there) which is why I switched printers because I didn’t like the rearranging aspect, and I hated it when it would flip the layouts, but love shutterfly for everything else 🙂 I can not wait to print mine!!!
Robin – you can add dates and captions – I opted not to – partially because I didn’t feel I could consistently write them – some pics were just last minute goofy pics!
But you can definitely do the captions with Shutterfly.
I can’t wait to see your book!
How neat!! Now I’m definitely going to want to put all my pics from 09/09 through 08/10 in a book like that.
hi
Found your link via a search for 365 photo products. I’d started using Blurb as I’m using them for my blog to books, but wanted advice for my 365 which I did for both boys (phew!). My problem is how do you combine portrait/vertical and landscape/horizontal shots on a page of 4 which is what I’d planned to do also. I keep switching between Blurb, Shutterfly and Kodak as a result trying to get the best product. The project wasn’t so much about what we did on every day but to record how my baby’s faces changed every day with the blog to books doing the recording of what we did etc. Any advice pls and also, if you had about 90 pages (assuming 4×90=360) what was the price? Blurb only charge 25c per extra page. Thanks Catherine