August is right around the corner and it will mark our three year wedding anniversary. In honor of the momentous occasion, I finally did something I should have done years ago – I put together our wedding album. Now I could have gone the expensive route and paid $1,000 to have a special book made with Italian leather and all the trimmings. But considering we were on a strict wedding budget at the time, I decided to veto that option.
Instead, I ended up using a company called Blurb which allows you make your own photo books for a fraction of the cost of a professional photo album. And the cool thing? It still looks professional!
It’s not perfect, mind you. The print on the cover turned out a little darker than I would have wanted, but the pictures are crisp and clear and the paper is nice and thick.
To get started, I just downloaded the Blurb software onto our computer. Then I uploaded all of the pictures that I thought I’d want to use. (One downside to this: the book and the pictures are not stored on Blurb’s server meaning that you cannot upload it and then work on it from any computer. Instead, they are saved onto whatever computer you have saved it on. Not a huge issue unless you have multiple computers and want to have remote access.)
Once the software and pictures were loaded, I had to decide on the size of the book as well as the shape. The one that we chose was the standard landscape (10 x 8 inches) but we could have gone as small as 7×7 or as large as 12×12. There’s even the option of having the cover picture printed directly onto the book itself or using a book flap we ended up using.
Next came the fun stuff – creating each page. I began with a table of contents which I wrote over a photo of our flowers.
The format was great because I was able to include text like this in addition to the pictures. It was a super easy way to give all the details that I knew I would someday forget such as what kind of wedding cake filling we had and what we served as an appetizer.
Blurb offers dozens of templates to choose from so that each page could have either one photo, ten photos, or none at all.
This is great because it allowed me to be creative and
Not only that, but I was able to use every single picture that I had from our wedding, even the non-professional “fun” shots that I wasn’t sure how to use but knew that I didn’t want to throw away.
I was able to choose the color of each page so I switched from red to black and back again.
It added a little bit of color but still kept it looking nice.
At the end of the book, on a plain black background, I listed the names of all the songs that were played throughout our special day. I also wrote out what was said during the ceremony so that we would have a record of it.
Altogether, the book has almost 220 pages in it. It includes over 500 pictures and dozens of lines of text. Overall I am very pleased with how it turned out and I would definitely use Blurb again.
Is it the same quality as the $1,000 book we could have bought? No, probably not. Is it worth the $62.00 that I paid for it? Absolutely!
** Wedding pictures taken by the talented Mindy K. Best of MK Best Photography.
Have you ever made a photo book? Which company/software did you use?
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