Works For Me Wednesday #14 – Shutterfly Photo Book

Up until last fall, I always had used Shutterfly.com to upload all of my family photos, in order to back them up and share them with family and friends. Last year I won a free membership to Flickr, and have used that ever since – but my older photos are all still on Shutterfly and that account is still active.

A couple of weeks ago, I got an e-mail in my inbox with a special offer from Shutterfly.  I get these fairly often, and usually ignore them.

This time I didn’t.

Note – this is not a sponsored or paid post of any sort. I simply want to share what I discovered about the process and product of making photo books this way.

The offer was for a free 8×8 Photo Book (free plus shipping, that is), of up to 20 pages. I’d never done any kind of online scrapbooking before – although it’s something I’ve gotten interested in trying out. I enjoy scrapbooking in general, but have found that I just don’t have the time – or the space – to do as much of it as I would like. But I love the idea of using photos I’ve already uploaded and being able to customize layouts and page design to create something that can be printed out as often as I want to.

So I spent a couple of days figuring out the photo book process (the interface was extremely easy to use), choosing page backgrounds (there are a ton of them to choose from), fonts, writing text – and deciding which photos to include.  One downside of having switched everything over to Flickr is that my recent photos aren’t on Shutterfly, so I had to upload the ones I wanted to use over there. But that really wasn’t a big deal.

Quick note – Flickr does have the option to design and order photo books as well, but I looked at them and they don’t appear to be nearly as customizable as the Shutterfly ones are in terms of layout and design. I do like that you can insert photos easily by using your Flickr sets and/or tags though.

I chose to make a book that covers the 2007/2008 school year – from Fall 2007 to Spring 2008. I pretty much included just the ‘high points’ or major events and holidays.  Choosing just a few photos for every page was very challenging – I take a lot of photos. 

When I was done, I ordered the book and only a few days later held it in my hands – for a total of less than $10 in shipping charges – definitely not a bad deal!

I am extremely impressed at the quality – of the whole thing. The printing, the paper, the binding – it’s a hardcover, fully bound book, and it’s completely customized just exactly as I designed it online:

Here’s another look at a set of pages as designed online, and how they turned out in the actual book:

The books aren’t too badly priced even without the special deal I got – this book would have cost about $25 plus shipping. When you consider what I would’ve spent on printing photos and scrapbooking supplies for traditional scrapbooking, it probably would come out about even. Plus – I can order multiple copies of this book or re-order at any time as well, since it’s saved in my Shutterfly projects. I’m thinking Christmas gifts for the grandparents…..  Definitely will work for me!