I decided a long time ago that using blurb.com to turn my blog into a book wasn't the answer for our family album as it doesn't fully document our lives. ie there is one whole post about oxiclean, but not a mention about M's 1st birthday. And I don't want the pressure of feeling like I do have to document every event on my blog.
So...I've decided to make one huge photo book every year, starting with the previous Christmas and ending with Thanksgiving so I can get it ordered in time to give to Craig for Christmas (surpirse! for the the next 20 years). I've made 4 or 5 smaller photo books through iphoto and a few through shutterfly and heard good reviews of a few other websites, but shutterfly won out after some research.
Here's what i liked about it:
-they come in the biggest size 12x12 (you can only get a large-10x12- on iphoto if you have the newest, newest iLife)
-cheaper than iPhoto and snapfish, especially if you wait for their sales to order
-lots of layouts to choose from and easy to pick a different background for every page
Tips if you decided to make one:
-I typed a lot of journaling throughout the book and have gone back and written in even more. I've learned that you really don't remember things that you think you will.
-I made a 2 photo CD's with every photo in it (510 photos-our best of the 3000! pics we took in 2009) and put one in the back of the book and plan to store the other at a house other than ours. Also, i can always access those photos online through shutterfly.
-the limit on pages was 101-through every website I found. I had to really force myself to use a limited amount of photos and in the end, I'm glad it's the length it is and not 300 pages -which I easily could have filled.
-I arranged and edited all my pics in iPhoto before importing them, one month at a time, into shutterfly. It's much easier to work with your pics in iPhoto than Shutterfly.
so now you know way more than you wanted to about making a photo book.
