Week 18 of the Weekly Organization Challenge

This is week 18 of The Good Wife's Weekly Organization Challenge! This week focused on photos.

I never got into the scrapbooking craze that was popular years ago and thank god. I can only imagine the amount of time and money I would have spent on books and printing photos. No, instead I decided to keep all my photos (save for our wedding and honeymoon since I was digital camera-less back then) on the computer. Mostly it was just random shit. A family reunion here. A vacation there.

It wasn't until after the birth of The Good Daughter did my picture taking increase 11 fold. And that is when I really fell in love with photo books. 

Just take a look at my baby.

Years ago I had made a photo book of our wedding photos, but since all of those were scans from originals, there was a lot of crappy editing after the fact. Now that all the photos I have of TGD are digital and I know what the shit I am doing in Photoshop (to a degree) I am able to edit the images in a way I want.

To make the book above - an overview of the first year of TGD's life - I used My Publisher. There are other sites too. I have used Shutterfly to make calendars and liked how they turned out.

The reason I used My Publisher for TGD's book, though was I got a killer coupon code for a buy one, get one (which you can score yourself too if you are a new customer). So to create her book, I chose the classic hardcover book with a book jacket. A standard size, 20 page book is less than $30 and that is a killer deal. My book was 100 pages, so it made it just under $114. But I got two. So I gave one to my mom for mother's day.

Some of the features I love about creating photo books, is the ability to print the photos to the whole page. There is no edge and you can fill a page with a single image or several. There are also several different layouts to chose from and each page can be different and unique.

And you can fit a ton of photos in the book. I think there is something like 400 photos of TGD in her book. So when highlighting all her first foods, you can fit up to 12 photos on a page. 

I have a photo book for every year of her life so far and plan to continue to do it for The Good Son. Once they get older, the books will turn into a family year book of sorts, highlighting our vacations and our little family as it grows.

Another great thing about using photo books, is you can design them over a period of time. So at the end of each month you can create a few pages and save your work. Then at the end of the year, you can complete your book and order it. Plus you still have all the originals on your computer but also in a high quality photo book that everyone will love to look at.

DISCLAIMER: I was not paid, in any way, by anyone to write this post.

Organize along with me in The Good Wife's Weekly Organization Challenges