Just in case you have been crappy about keeping a baby book, photo websites make it super easy to make gorgeous coffee table type albums that will make you look so very together.
When my mom and I took a very special girls trip to Italy to celebrate my 30th birthday (thanks Mom!), I made her a fancy hardback photo book using the iPhoto software right on my computer in about an hour. She loves it and it has a place of honor in her living room. Score!
The cheapest options are about $15 for an 8×8 book with soft pages. The fanciest are so expensive I couldn’t even price with all the bells and whistles. Honestly, you want embossed, engraved, hard-bound with designer review with a new pantone color that you invented? You can probably get that! Here are a few of the many many fancy photo books available from our affiliate Shutterfly:
Photo Book: An Adoption Story – 8×8
Price: $29.99 | Sale: $22.49 | Buy Now on Shutterfly
Baby’s First Year, 8×11 Photo Book
Price: $44.99 | Sale: $37.49 | Buy Now
Price: $134.99 | Sale: $127.49 | Buy Now (dang, I hope it’s hard cover with that price!)
These are really nice. My MIL has gotten us two of these from Ofoto (so far! she’s a bit camera and picture obsessed).
Thanks for the reminder about this idea — I think I’m gonna have to make one of the Little Man as a present for her next visit (Labor Day — woohoo! heh).
My husband and I did this when TJ was first born. We kept notes throughout the pregnancy and interspersed them with photos of me and my growing belly. The last page is a photo of TJ on his first day in the world.
I recently made one at Snapfish and it looks gorgeous! Photo books always a hit!
Have you tried these guys?
http://www.mycustomstory.com/
I haven’t, but I’d really like to make our baby a board book of family around the world. Maybe for Christmas…
i love these photo books. as i upload the albums, i choose the ones that will go in the photo book, the site (shutterfly is what i use) saves my book as long as i want…and then i wait til they are running a sale to buy the book. this is the only way i make photo albums now, and i love it.
plus i feel very safe — if heaven forbid something happened to my photo albums, i could go back to shutterfly and re-purchase them, since they’re saved. a little doomsday of me, but hey…who hasn’t thought about what you would snatch from your house in a fire/flood/emergency…
I received a photo book for a gift and I loved it.
Hey Heather great info, but there still some good service providers missing from your list. Anyways your post has been useful there some names I was not aware. 🙂
Another great photo book website is blub (www.blub.com). It is super easy to download their software (for mac or pc) and using the software is even simpler!
You can drag and drop photos or link to any of your photo libraries on your computer.
Best of all you can create your own page layouts (with or without captions). So you are not tied to a prescribed number of photos per page. Either use their templates or make your own.
Happy Booking:)
I think you might mean blurb (www.blurb.com), which is AMAZING. I just printed a 260-page book of photos and LOVE it.
Ha ha, Kim. I think you’re right.
I absolutely love Picaboo for photobooks. I was a designer in my former life and love adobe products and this uses an adobe based program. It’s a little pricey, but they go on sale and the freedom and creativity is AWESOME. They are working out a few things they forgot to put in there… like photo editing options, but having no constraints for were you put your pics or text is worth having to re-size in a different program (until they update their program). Check it out.