First off, a huge thanks to everyone who has been weighing in on my post from yesterday. There’s something oddly comforting about knowing that the vast majority of you are stuck in similar situations to me. I wish none of us were, but GAH… at least I’m not alone, right? We’ll figure something out. This is definitely pushing me to figure out Charlie’s income more concretely (since he started his own company this past spring we really aren’t sure how much money is “income” we can use to pay personal bills – I so need some QuickBooks help). I really want to at least get 8w at home with this kid, so we will make it work somehow.
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At any rate, PICTURES!
If you’ve been following me for any length of time, you know that I’m a picture addict. I literally take thousands and thousands of pictures a year, and I finally got motivated to turn the digital insanity into photo albums. The first task was going through my pictures and DELETE-DELETE-DELETE. This is something I’ve tried to be better about every year (and I have improved!), but seriously, for every 30 pictures you take, probably 3 are worth keeping in the long run. I am not exaggerating that percentage. If you keep too many pictures, it will be too overwhelming for you to ever go back and look through anything. Can you imagine if you had 10,000 pictures a year of your childhood? Would you ever look at ANY of them? Hellz no!
With that being said, I condensed the entire year of 2011 into 400 photos on 86 pages. That’s an average of 4.65 pictures per page and 1.1 pictures per day. Stella was born in DECEMBER of that year, which is the only reason I didn’t max the book out at 100 pages. 🙂
I condensed the entire year of 2012 into 510 photos on 100 pages. That’s 5.1 pictures per page, and 1.4 pictures per day. It was my first full year as a parent, can ya blame me for increasing my averages? 🙂
In all honesty, I think that 400-500 pictures is a good range for these photo books. I usually buy the “Classic” size from MyPublisher (8.75″ x 11.25″), and I put anywhere from 1-8 pictures per page. Of the 9 books I’ve made with MyPublisher over the past five years, 5 were classic sized, 2 were pocketbooks (grandparent gifts), and 2 were deluxe (super large format – I used that for our wedding album & made two versions – one for us that included the proposal/bridal showers/bachelor(ette) parties/etc and one for our parents that was just wedding pics). They have a ton of different styles to choose from – I just tend to use the “Bestseller” format which is really clean lines & you can shoot how much/little text to include on each page.
Overall, I am continually impressed with their printing quality at MyPublisher, and the prices really can’t be beat either. They run promotional sales all the time, and I ordered the books above for about $60/ea when they were running a 60% off sale on 100 page books. It would have been less, but I paid for the upgrade for 170# paper and super gloss printing (to protect them from sticky toddler fingers), just to see what I thought. In all honestly, the books are ridiculously high quality, and I am really happy with how they turned out. The only thing I might do differently for the 2013 Yearbook is to pay the extra for lay flat pages (insider tip – when you’re going to check out, do NOT choose the layflat option — and they’ll offer it to you one last time right before checkout for 50% off, which saves you $12.50!).
If you just thought “$60?!! That’s insane!” — think again. That means I’ve spent $5/month to print up all the pictures I love. Think back to when you actually printed rolls of film, and if you’re anything like me, I guarantee you spent a LOT more than $5/month on picture developing! Also, there was 1 page of my 2012 book that had a printing error on it (the page somehow smudged). This is the 1st time I have ever noticed a printing mistake in any of my books, and when I contacted them about it, they got back to me within 2 days – apologized – and said a new book is being printed and is on its way, free of charge. How’s that for customer service?!
So there ya go — for the millionth time, I totally love MyPublisher (and FWIW – they have NO idea who I am and I am not being compensated for this) and I highly recommend using them to print your photo books. Take the time to start working on it now, because if you let it go too many years, you’ll just get overwhelmed and never print anything, and where’s the fun in that? 🙂
[FYI – the photo spreads above are screen shots from my computer straight out of the program.]