A snapshot of the photobook

I have spent considerable time over the last couple of months since we've been back from our trip editing our photos, and planning and putting together the files to order a photobook.  Although I'm obviously a very keen scrapbooker and still love doing that the traditional way, we had soooo many photos (6002, which became 600 or so when whittled down to the 'bare essentials') that the task of scrapbooking them for an album of the trip was just too much - and would also be way too expensive.  So, we decided to make a photobook instead which covers photos from the entire trip along with a few words about them.

Rather than use the layouts or templates that come with each company you can order the books from,  I decided to make my own file in Photoshop that covered the entire page and used the number, size and shape of photographs that I wanted, in the layout I wanted, with the text and font the way I wanted. That way, I could have the page laid out exactly right, and the photobook program would just see it as one big photo to cover the entire page of the book.

The front cover has a square cut-out and just the middle bit will show through.  You can probably guess that the photo above is the front page.

There is a total of 99 pages plus the front page, which is the maximum number of pages allowed. I think I fit about 600 photos into this book, of all different sizes.  I had 'highlight' photos that took up the entire page, pages that focussed on one monument or part of a city, and pages that were city overviews.  Some pages had writing on them (and those that didn't had accompanying writing on the facing page) and some pages were titled.  Each page (except for the higlight photos) had the city and country written in the outside bottom corner of the page (ie the left-hand pages had it on the left, and the right-hand pages had it on the right), although looking through the pics below most are from the left side!  Here are some of the pages from the book:

Harvey Norman Photos (online) had a 30% off photobooks special last week so I placed the order. They say to allow up to 10 days, and we're coming up for that now so hopefully it won't be too far away.  I can't wait to see how it turns out!  I'll post some photos of the actual book when it arrives.

I'm thinking that this type of book would be a great way to document photos from the year (like a summary book once a year) or a special even that you have heaps of photos from (like a family Christmas gathering).  I could also see a 'baby's first year' book or something.  The finished products are so slim that they don't take up much space in the bookcase or on the coffee table, but it actually gets digital photos off the hard drive and into a book you can actually flick through.  It took quite a while to do and set up the templates, but I think it will all be worth it.  Plus, the time spent is fairly miniscule compared to the time if I had scrapped an entire album of the whole trip - and just think how much it would cost!

This book cost a total of about $120, while an empty scrapbook album costs about $40 alone!  Add in 100 pieces of plain cardstock (with absolutely nothing else) and that's another $65 - not to mention the photos themselves! Even at the 9c special at HN that's at least $50.  So, although $120 sounds like a lot, I think it will turn out to be a great book for considerably less cost than a scrapbook.  Plus, the major benefit is that it will actually GET DONE!! I will still definitely scrapbook some of my favourite photos from the trip in my normal 2010 scrapbook, but the finished album of the entire trip will always be there too.

Now that I've got my templates done up, I would be more than happy to help family and friends do one - I know a couple of you have been thinking of doing something similar so just let me know.

Hopefully it will arrive in a couple of days.