We’re working on hanging our new pendant lights so we’ll be back to share those pics in the morning. In the meantime, let’s talk about something people ask about all the time: photo storage. Ever since seeing Katie Bower’s family photo book two summers ago, we’ve been drinking the photo book Kool-Aid – starting with our very first Family “Yearbook” that we made last summer (you can read about that here). And now that another year has wrapped up, well, let’s just say this arrived last week:
It’s one big glossy photo book stuffed to the gills with all of our family photos from 2011. Except the perk is that while it has around 600 photos, it’s only about a half-inch thick. Which is awesome for storage purposes (way less cumbersome than thick overstuffed photo albums that only hold 100-200 pics each). We ordered it through MyPublisher and thanks to a promotion they were running for free extra pages, we got to max out their page limit (100) and pay nothing extra. The discount (which has ended since we received our book – but they tend to pop up pretty frequently) actually saved us $79! And we’d easily pay $44.99 to print all those pics (not to mention having to buy a bunch of albums to put them in) so a photo book can actually end up being quite the deal. And no, they didn’t pay/perk us to write this, we just like our photo books. Haha.
We did our last “yearbook” way after the fact (like mid-2011), so it took a bit of backtracking to organize all of the photos. But for 2011 we planned ahead and kept all of our photos in one iPhoto album (which automatically kept them in chronological order for us), which is why it only took a couple of weeks into the new year to actually get this one done. So let’s take a quick look through all one hundred pages… just kidding. We’ll just take a peek at some of the highlights – like our opening page that we edited to include some text to summarize some of the, well, highlights from the past year. We think we’ll love looking back on it (and having a summary of the whole year on one page).
We also tried to group big events, holidays, and milestones – like the several spreads of Clara’s 1st birthday party. Check out how dark our kitchen was in the bottom left corner!
We also used the preset page designs to give some really special photos the layouts they deserved, like the ones Katie B. snapped when we visited the Bowers in June.
And since it’s not hard for these albums to turn into a Clara-fest, we paid special attention to making sure Burger got plenty of love as well. He even scored a few dedicated pages throughout (every album needs a good Burger-montage or three).
We also thought it was fun to put all of the photos we took for our Blogiversary “Day In The Life” post into the yearbook in order. That way in 15 years we can look back and sort of remember what a normal day was like way back when…
We nearly ran out of pages by the time we got to Christmas (darn 100 page limit!) but managed to make room. Heck, we even squeezed in a collage of a bunch of our holiday card outtakes. Yeah, we’re kind of into our kiddos.
So since we’re on a family yearbook high – especially now that our collection is two albums strong! – we’re already excited to make the 2012 version.
But because that’s not possible yet (unless we want it to be 3 pages long) we’re thinking that we may try to organize our old digital photos and make one or two books that’ll hold all of the photos from 2005 (when we met) to 2008 (right before our 2009 album picks up). Maybe we’ll work on those books once a certain manuscript is in the can.
Oh yeah, and here’s our favorite photo bomber again, just trying to get in on the action.
Anyone else making photo books or albums to document the past year? Or any other event or period of time? We’d love to hear other systems people have for organizing and displaying their family photos.
Lisa says
I would love to know what you think of the photo quality on these – and are you able to pull in your flickr albums, or do you have to upload them from your hard drive? I recently did this for my daughter’s first 6 months as a Christmas gift to our families, via snapfish, and I wasn’t very happy with the quality of the printed photos. Thank you! Love love love your blog!
YoungHouseLove says
It works with free software that you download so I don’t think you can pull them from flickr. The quality is awesome though. Hope it helps!
xo,
s
Hillary says
My brother and I pounced on the MyPublisher promo too! We are making a book of our 16 day Asia trip as a gift for my parents’ 31st wedding anniversary (the trip was to celebrate their 30th!)
The hardest part was fitting everything we wanted while getting some big full page shots in there, but you certainly nailed it!
Beth says
Oh, I’m so copying this!
Mamaw03T says
Love it! Thanks for the gift ideas for this year!
Jenelle says
Mmm. Fantastic idea to make it a family yearbook. I had been planning on making one book per year of my daughter’s life, but making a family yearbook instead takes into account any family changes/expansions. Good idea!
Also, if you ever decide to pierce Clara’s ears, I saw these yesterday and thought of you guys… http://www.etsy.com/listing/74122177/phillips-screw-earrings?ref=sr_gallery_38&sref=&ga_search_query=children%27s+earrings&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_ship_to=US&ga_page=3&ga_search_type=handmade&ga_facet=handmade
YoungHouseLove says
Aw cute!
xo,
s
Giulia says
Funny, I just wrote about our photo book as well…great minds think alike?
http://www.fishlynews.com/2012/01/from-jpg-to-print-another-year-in.html
YoungHouseLove says
Haha- I love it!
xo,
s
Kristen @ Popcorn on the Stove says
I’m in the process of making photo albums of our wedding for my parents & my in-laws, but it’s much harder than I anticipated!
Ginny @ Goofy Monkeys says
I love the idea of a yearbook! I may have to steal it :)
My grandmother was a crazy scrapbook keeper. She made 2 sets so each of their kids would have them. We still look at them – photos going back 3-4 generations. It’s great stuff!
Laura says
How do you guys find time to do all of this! Seriously. I am in awe. I did a calendar for a my mom for Christmas and spent 4 hrs just on that! It had, like, 30 pictures in it, max! If I did this it would take me at least 20 hours. But you telling me that it only took you 6 does have me inspired… now that I think about it, a lot of my 4 hours was spent on cropping and editting red-eye. It was not fun!
YoungHouseLove says
It definitely helped to have all the photos stored in one chronological folder, so we just went through, picked our favorites, uploaded them and use preset templates (you just drag and drop) and did that a few hours a night for a few nights in a row!
xo,
s
Lori M. says
LOVE it! Definitely got to jump on the band wagon this year! :) Did you design everything in iPhoto or use My Publisher templates?
YoungHouseLove says
We designed all of it within my publisher!
xo,
s
Emily says
We love doing our “Year in Review” books!!! We use Mixbook which is oh-so-awesome because it gives it more a scrapbook type appearance and you can use so many different theme ideas and you can access it from anywhere (no software download). We started in 2009 with our fun leading up to wedding and honeymoon and then decided to keep doing it every year. I have also made one for the ongoing progress in our house (a before and after album to keep up with our work) and made a vacation one for my mom. We absolutely adore having these small, hardcover, and well-made books for our forever photo memories!
Karen F says
omg I MUST do this. thank you for the inspiration! I did a “first year” book for my older daughter, and have the photos in a folder in iPhoto for my younger daughter (haven’t made the book yet) but I really need to get into the habit of making a book per year for the fam.
Sam @ Leave the Nest Up to Me says
That’s such a great idea. The BF and I are terrible at remembering to take pictures — hopefully that changes down the line!
Lyndsay says
I’ve also done this for our family since 2009 with MyPublisher! It is such a great way to tell the story of your family events each year. My kids are now 4 and 6 and they love looking through the books and reading about their lives! One year we gave each month a page of it’s own. January 2009 – then wrote the summary of what happened that month. The following pages coordinated with the story. We completed the entire year that way. I now take so many pictures and it is hard to decide which photos to include in the book and which to leave out, that I can’t afford using 12 pages of ‘story’. Now I typically split it up into 6 month periods! Jan – June and July – Dec. It is such a fun and challenging project for me each year. Now all of the grandparents order a book (I already have them asking for our 2011 book)! I order two copies for our house so that each of my children will have them once they are grown and out of the house! I love how you’ve done your books and glad that you’ve shared it with others. A lot of families don’t know what to do with their pictures if they aren’t scrapbookers! I’ve shared this book idea with personal friends and family and they love it! However…many of them have the callenge of how to begin organizing their pictures – which is a completely different project!
Megan says
This is such a good idea! What an awesome way to keep your memories in such a glamorous way.
You said you use a Nikon D300, right? (I think I’m remembering properly) The pictures you take are just gorgeous and really look beautiful in the albums.
I’m sure Clara will appreciate the thoroughness in which you’ve documented your life :D
YoungHouseLove says
It’s a Nikon D3000 actually! Haha. It sounds straight from the future to me with that big number. Hope it helps!
xo,
s
Lisa G. says
I did this! I order through iPhoto and am always extremely happy with the quality of the books, and the ease and efficiency of ordering:) Our little girl just turned one, so I made a book of her first year (minus a few weeks) and gave them to our fathers for Christmas.
Rebecca says
I love photobooks and I love scrapbooking….so I technically have alot of each with many overlapping topics. I need to learn how to cut back!
Michelle says
I totally need to do this for my wedding! We got married over 2 years ago, and I can’t bear to spend tons of $$ on a book done professionally by the photographer when I can spend under $50 and do it online! Thanks for the inspiration, your pages are beautiful!
Tara Jane says
I love My Publisher, I have been making “a family Year in review book” for the last 6 years with them and the software has really gotten much better. I like your cover, I have been sticking with the cloth covers to make ours all part of one group. I also make a special one for my mom and another one for my mother-in-law requesting photos from our siblings. It is a ton of work, but a much loved gift.
Jessica @ Quirky Bookworm says
That’s pretty neat! I did one book of Eleanor’s first month of life, and we have one of our wedding, but I hadn’t thought of doing a yearly book. I figure my mommy blog is sort of like our online yearbook, but it’d be nice to have hard copies to look at.
Growing up we loved getting out my mom’s photo albums and looking through all the pictures, but this seems like way less work! :)
Kim @ Yellow Brick Home says
Eek! I love photo books! We use Blurb to make them – we made a huge one as our wedding album, and for a Christmas gift one year, I made a 400 page (yes, PAGE – not amount of photos!) full bleed spread of our photos from our 2 year anniversary trip down the California coast. It is so, so awesome to be able to have that forever.
Once you start laying out the design on one, it’s so addicting!
Larisa says
I also did a MyPublisher photoyearbook for 2011. For 2010, I did blurb, and MyPublisher definitely beat it in terms of quality (earlier I did winkflash, which was the cheapest, but last quality-wise). Love MyPublisher.
I did about $30 of extra upgrades (lay-flat pages, glossier photos, thicker paper), and will keep doing that for every book in the future. I also did every spread via Photoshop, and then uploaded full-page spread onto myPublisher. Love photobooks! =)
Larisa says
Oh, so since I did every spread via Photoshop, it took me many, many hours more (about half an hour for each spread, so 50 hours). But I did this over the course of the year, so it wasn’t too bad. Definitely makes the photobook more special though =)
martha says
I just finished one for our family for last year. It started 3 or 4 years ago, with a book about fun things we did with our grandkids that summer, but then, decided we needed to include ALL our family! So the past two years, it’s been a ‘Family Fun Times’. This year, I hope to organize and work on the book, as the year goes by. I found it quite overwhelming to choose pictures, plan layout, stickers, background for a whole year at one time. I’m proud to say that I started my 2012 book the other night! :) We just went to the circus together!! :) I use Shutterfly.
Amy @ A New Old House says
Love the idea of a Family Yearbook!
I’ve been doing a photo book for each of the kids’ birthday parties (I love finding pages & designs to go with the party theme). I also make one for each family vacation.
Hadn’t thought about doing a full year- thanks for the tip!
I’m thinking that in the future, I should watch for sales on them and get two copies made of each album so my boys can each have one.
Kala M. says
Our wedding photographer put together a book for us as a surprise. It was great. He used our favorite wedding photo as the cover(it is my profile picture on my blog). I think we would like to go back and make our own so we can pick out pictures that are special to us. But it was so great that he did one for us. I think we may have to consider doing yearbooks because printed photos take up too much space and if you don’t print them they just sit on your computer and don’t get looked at enough.
Small Houses says
How adorable..
And you know you’ve set the standard right? All future kids (and pups) must get equal scrapbook time!
dee :)
YoungHouseLove says
Haha- it’s true.
xo,
s
emily griffith says
I too, have been doing books like this for the past few years..the first year I spent tons of time typing captions for each page, accidentally typed some captions in the header and footer part, then turned off the header and footer part not realizing it was removed my captions as well. OOPS! Now I intentionally don’t type anything and handwrite all my captions which I think adds some character and hopefully will be extra cool for kids, grandkids, etc. down the road!
Lauren says
I did one for our wedding (our good friend who is also a wedding photog did our pics for free and gave us full digital rights!). Also put in the Bible verses used in our ceremony, and excerpts of love letters and sweet texts that I’d saved from when we were first dating. I love looking through it! I’m working on one from our honeymoon in Paris (only 2 years late on that one!) doing one for our every day pics each year sounds like fun too.
Megan says
We did this to chronicle our home improvement projects. It’s been so great to show our friends and family when they visit – now we don’t have to say, “you wouldn’t believe how ugly the carpet was when we first moved in!” – we can show them! Kind of like a hard-copy DIY blog.
YoungHouseLove says
Haha- I love it!
xo
s
Val says
I love this idea and I loved the one you did last year, we’re just not very good about taking lots of pictures — we just never remember to do it. I made a beautiful book on Shutterfly with all my wedding photos and had the best time working on it. I was so proud of how it came out. Hoping to do better at taking pics this year!
Victoria says
thanks! i was wondering that style – like you can choose bestseller, storyteller, collage, etc…
YoungHouseLove says
Hmm, I think ours was called Bestseller, but it’s basically the one that’s blank pages and doesn’t have any other coloring or graphics to it (we like it clean with just the pics doing the “talking” – haha.
xo,
s
Amy @ The Button Casa says
My mother-in-law is a scrapbooker but I can’t get into all the cutting and pasting. I’ve done a few on Shutterfly and love them. I’ve sent them as presents to my m-i-l too and she loves them. That way we both win :)
Katie says
We do an annual book like this through Shutterfly. So far we have 2008, 2009, and 2010, and I just started putting together 2011. The hardest part is keeping up with it throughout the year so that I’m not starting on 2011 in January 2012 (shame on me!).
These books are so worth it though. They are a favorite of our 4-year-old son, so we’ve spent a lot of time sitting and looking at them with him playing “do you remember when” and “this is when you were in mommy’s tummy” or “this is the house we lived in before you were born,” etc.
Amanda says
We promised our families photobooks of our wedding for Christmas…and they’re still not made. You guys probaby have a LOT more photos that we do for a book, but I’m dreading going through 1000+ wedding pictures (my self-imposed deadline is Friday and I kind of haven’t started).
YoungHouseLove says
Aw, I know what you mean about the dread thing. But once you get into it you might even have fun!
xo,
s
Erin says
I can totally “hear” Burger in those pictures. “Pictures of books and not me…. Come on, Guys!”
arianne st.john says
we had a photographer at the birth of our daughter and made the sweetest book of her birth. she is 8 months and it is so nice to be able to remember that day so clearly!
we have been taking monthly pictures of her as well and will make a first birthday book that includes the candid stuff as well as the staged shots!
Tirsa says
What a great idea! I will definitely give this one a try. I have iphoto, but always felt it was too expensive. This looks far more reasonable.
Thanks!
Valerie says
I love photo books! I don’t have the patience to scrapbook anymore but feel guilty if my pictures are only on my computer.
My current system is to do a travel photo book for every year (I travel a decent amount) in a biggish coffee table style book. Also starting this year I am doing my own version of Project Life, so a 2 page spread of pictures & journaling for every week.
I usually use Blurb but will look into MyPublisher!
jenna says
I just finished one of these too! I uploaded all my pics onto snapfish at home… Then I went to work and sat there all weekend working on the book… Hehe
Lindsay L. says
They look great! I’m actually working on one at My Publisher now but it’s kinda overwhelming. Their process is pretty easy, but the number of pictures I have in iphoto is insane! How do you keep your picture number from getting out of control and overwhelming? Do you delete any as you go or do you just store the ones you love in the 2011 folder eventually meant for the book?
YoungHouseLove says
We only dragged the pics we loved in (meaning we had around 1200 but picked our 600 faves). It took a bit of effort, but we realized that we didn’t need ten photos of Clara eating peanut butter- just three did the trick. Hah.
xo,
s
Robin says
LOVE LOVE LOVE THIS. Ready to get home and order a family yearbook of our own!
Lindsay says
Looks amazing! My mom does a similar thing for a big family trips. Speaking of books, do you guys know if your book will be available for pre-order? I’m itching to buy!
YoungHouseLove says
Aw thanks! Not sure, I think maybe this summer? It comes out in the fall!
xo,
s
Michele says
love it! i had a plan in place to make one for each year of my kids lives and have it ready around their birthday’s each year… but now i’m totally going to have to steal this idea and do a family book for each calendar year, BRILLIANCE!
yet another awesome idea I will yoink straight from your blog. you guys rule. :)
Jane says
Thanks for the inspiration and motivation!! I was a copy-editor in the yearbook staff in high school, so the idea of a family yearbook makes me so giddy!!
Adding “Make Photobook” to my 2012 to-do list immediately!
LARY says
So cute! A couple years ago after I visited Italy I meant to make a book and never finished it. You might inspire me to get it done after 3 years haha
Teri says
As someone who is expecting baby #2 any day, and never did a photo book for baby #1 (or our wedding, for that matter), I find this idea so appealing! I love that it includes the whole family, I adore the highlights page, and it seems like a much lower-pressure approach than trying to capture every significant thing about a child. Thanks for such a great idea!!
Erika says
That is a fantastic idea!
Erin says
I just ordered 3 photobooks from snapfish with a buy 1 get 2 offer because after having our first child two years ago I have gotten behind in scrapbooking. Now with our second on the way, I need to clean out a bedroom and decided to bite the bullet and just make photobooks instead of scrabooking or using photo albums that take up way too much space. I think I will do this from now on for time saving purposes, but just wondering: Do you happen to know how My Publisher compares to other sites (in terms of quality, ease of use, overall look) that sell photobooks such as snapfish and shutterfly?
YoungHouseLove says
We’ve heard many photo savvy folks (aka: photographers) love it because it has great picture quality and the layouts are clean. Very happy with it!
xo,
s
Ann @ The Domestic Domicile says
Love this idea! What a great simple way to do a years worth of pics without the bulky hassle of a photo album. Genius!
Salena Santos says
I love MyPublisher! I just received our yearly photo books last week for 2009, 2010, and 2011. I took advantage of thier free pages as well. I saved well over $300.00. They are so much fun to have around and look back on. My daughter who is 3, keeps asking us to read her the story(even though it’s all pics) again and again.