Shutterfly Photobook Giveaway
November 4, 2009 | Filed Under Photos | 208 Comments
Updated to add: This giveaway is now closed. The winners are #158 Nikki and #186 Sophie!
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Photobooks changed my life! I absolutely have converted over from printing individual digital pictures and filing them away in an uninteresting album to creating beautiful photobooks that are fun to look and way less work to produce than traditional scrapbooking. They also make stunning inexpensive gifts!
I recently had the pleasure of creating a photobook using Shutterfly. They sent me a coupon for a free photobook and I jumped at the chance to create an album of our summer camping trip because both my mom and sister have used Shutterfly in the past and told me what a great experience they had.
So easy to use!
I am happy to report that Shutterfly was very easy to use and I was super excited to find out that they have a Simple Path format for people like me who don’t have a lot of time and want to create beautiful photobooks fast. With Simple Path all you have to do is upload your photos, choose a photobook size and theme and then have Shutterfly auto-fill those photos for you in chronological order into your book, automatically selecting the photo layouts and backgrounds. I LOVE this feature so much because when it’s done I can quickly and easily make any necessary adjustments I want and be in and out with no fuss, no muss. It really couldn’t be any easier than that.
Of course you always have the option of doing a more custom photobook as well depending on the time you have available. It’s totally your choice, the cost is the same either way.
So many background options and picture layouts!
Choosing background wallpaper is what make photobooks so much fun. Shutterfly has many different coordinating varieties to choose from. You can use all the same one or be wild and crazy and mix and match them 
Picture quality is superb!
Oh my goodness I was stunned by the first class picture quality. The photos are sharp and the colors true to live. Many of the pictures in my book fill an entire page and it feels like I could step right inside the photo it’s that clear.
Oh and I almost forgot to tell you about one of my very favorite features. Spine writing! You can write your title on the spine so that when your books are lined up on your shelf you can easily grab the one you need. Such great attention to detail!!
Want to try Shutterfly out for yourself?
I have TWO coupons available from Shutterfly for two free photobooks. One 5×7 book and one 7×9 book. Leave a comment on this post and I’ll select two random winners to each win one photobook to try out. Winners must use coupons before November 30, 2009.
Deadline to comment is November 7th at 9:00 pm PST.
Good luck and happy photobooking!!
Creating photo books with Inkubook
February 19, 2009 | Filed Under Books, Photos | 5 Comments
As many of my readers know organizing my photos has always been an issue for me. I really struggle with this. I suppose a lot of it has to do with the huge amount of pictures I take and then because of that I get completely overwhelmed with the whole editing, printing and filing process. The more pictures that get backlogged on me the more stressed I get and then the more I procrastinate the project. It’s easy for me to ignore because I’m not tripping over my pictures on a daily basis, they are tucked away on my computer. Out of sight, out of mind as they say. It’s definitely a viscious cycle that is for sure.
I’ve heard people talking about photo books for awhile now but they sounded complicated to my simple mind and I seriously didn’t want another thing confusing me. In January though I had the opportunity to check out Inkubook, an online photo book publishing service. A service that I absolutely fell in love with.
Love, love, love Inkubook! Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let me tell you why. From start to finish the process was so EASY. So easy even I could figure it out!
First thing I did was sign up for an account, which is free, and it allows you to play around creating books and having fun yet with no obligation to buy ever. Sweet! I decided to do a 2008 Christmas album and clicked on “start a new book”. The next screen gave me two options and this is where I really started to get excited.
The options were:
or
Start from scratch ~ feeling adventurous and creative? Build your book from start to finish.
Gee I wonder which one I picked?? Option #1 of course because I like simple and that sounded simple. And was it ever. All I had to do was select my theme (Contemporary Christmas for me) and upload my pictures (I had about 86 pictures) and then just sit back and wait while Inkubook did all the work. In about 10-15 minutes Inkubook chose the picture size and background pattern for each page and varied it up so each page was different. And because it puts the pictures in in the order you uploaded them they were all in the right sequence. I am not kidding you when I say how blown away I was by this. When the computer was finished doing it’s thing, just like that I had a beautiful book with lovely holiday patterned and colored background pages.
At this point I was given the option of making any adjustments I saw fit to either picture placement and size or to the layout and backgrounds. I could also add text if I wanted to. I only needed to move a couple of pictures around and it was super easy to do although to be honest I did run into a little snafu with my cover page. I decided I wanted to change the picture on the cover but when I tried to do it I could only get a tiny picture and of course I wanted it to fill the whole page.
I must admit I panicked for a good couple of minutes before, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a button that said Live Chat. Live Chat, ya right, that’ll be the day. I clicked on it and a chat box came up. I wrote hello in the box and sat back thinking I was going to have to wait awhile before anything happened. To say I was a little skeptical would have been an understatement. Would you believe someone immediately typed back hello to me. It was so quick I assumed I was corresponding with a computer but as I explained my problem and this friendly “computer” chatted back with me I realized I was in fact talking to a REAL LIVE person and not only that but she fixed me up lickety split and I was back on my way. Holy smokes how’s that for service!
When my book arrived in the mail I simply could not have been more pleased. It is a stunning hardcover book filled with pages and pages of amazing pictures printed on archival-quality silk paper.
The price for a book with 86 pictures? $43.95 which works out to about 51 cents a picture. But keep in mind that these pictures aren’t all 4×6 size. I have some 4×6, some 5×7 and some full page pictures included plus I don’t have to buy an album on top of that. It’s done. Done as in once I get the book I don’t have to do a single other thing to it except enjoy it!
The last thing that I want to touch on is that my book is thin which means it takes up way less space on my shelf than a photo album would holding the same amount of pictures. This is perfect for me as I’m fast running out of room on my photo album shelf.
Finally if anyone is interested, Inkubook is offering free shipping right now to residents of the US until the end of February with the code LUVFREESHIP. Also once you have an account set up you’ll be notified of any future promotions going on which is nice.
Check it out ~ it’s fun, easy, beautiful and FAST!
Did I mention I love Inkubook?!
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