#86 – Photo Book

First off, I just want to say that this post is in no way sponsored or affiliated – I just wanted to share about my experience making a photobook with Shutterfly!

  • Photos!
  • A computer

To be honest, I tried scrapbooking once, and I was terrible at it. Don’t get me wrong! I love the idea of having pictures and keepsakes in a beautiful album, but I would always stress way too much over the layout. I also found that the supplies could get quite expensive! Since we now live in such a digital age, I figured why not give a printed photo book a try?

I’ll just start off by saying that Shutterfly has terrible photo editing software, at least that I could find! I couldn’t even find a tilt-shift function on there, as I wanted to straighten some of my pictures that I had taken at a crooked angle. I would recommend editing all of your pictures before trying to arrange them on Shutterfly. Depending on how many pages you want in your book, and how many pictures you want per page, the number of photos will vary. My philosophy on vacations is actually to take many pictures as quickly possible, and then sort later for good ones. That way I can stay in the moment, but still have memories to look back on. My friend, Hylann, is a more composed photographer and prefers to find her angle and lighting first and then take her pictures. As long as it works for you!

There are a lot of themes, but I wanted a classic one that I could use for any future trips, so I stuck with the Classic White. I actually even went back after finishing this LA book to make one for my 2016 Iceland trip! I kept the same colour scheme and layout so that my photo books will look unified. If that’s something important to you, maybe consider going with a minimalistic theme.

I also ignored most of the layouts, and used the Advanced Editor to move pictures and size them exactly how I wanted. This meant that it took me a lot longer to organize everything, but I loved the control it gave me. There are also Auto-Fill options, if you don’t want to deal with that hassle.

All in all, I loved how the photo book looks! I’ll definitely treasure it, and having physical copies of pictures is something I’ve missed in this age of smart phones. I hope you guys liked this more tech-savvy DIY craft.

Until next time, happy crafting!

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