Day 15 and I haven’t started shopping! Ok, I did do a little, but I’m counting on 2 day shipping and IOU’s for the rest. I spent hours today on a personalized photobook for Grandma. I have to share the process with you today, because it’s not too late. Apple is still accepting orders for photobooks at standard shipping rates until December 18th.
Yes, you can get photobooks from Kodak Gallery, Winkflash, Snapfish, etc. but I went with Apple because they had the latest too-bad-so-sad-no-gift-for-you date and because it’s so completely integrated with iPhoto.
I’m going to walk you through my process in case you want to undertake a similarly crazy project the week before Christmas.
As this was a gift for Grandma, I emailed the 30+ members of the family asking for photos. I gave them a deadline of December 10th (yet still was receiving photos last night).
I had to follow this up with an explanation that a link to your Facebook account would not work. A link to your Snapfish account would also not work.
This is what I keep harping on. True photo sharing is NOT free. True photo sharing means that the person you are sharing with can download the high resolution photo for free. Facebook compresses the photos to save server space. If you download the photo, it would be thoroughly unprintable. Snapfish allows you to share, but you can’t even download a high-res of your OWN photos for free! Kodak allows you to download your own photos, but no one else can.
Situations like this are when services like SmugMug, Phanfare, and Cloudfire come in handy. They allow your family and friends to download the full resolution photo or video clip, in case they want to print it or include the video in their own home movie. True photo sharing has a price because the hosting company pays for the ginormous amount of server space needed to house your high resolution files. And you know what? It’s worth it.
Getting back to my crazy photobook project. I collected 5 to 10 photos from family members all across the country. New photos, old slides we had scanned, funny photos, even boring photos; everything was included in the first draft.
I wanted to keep to our allotted $25 Christmas gift budget, so I limited the book to 20 pages. This was possible by getting the large soft cover book with 3 to 6 photos per page.
Next I organized the photos into folders for the purpose of storytelling. As this was a mish-mosh of photos, I didn’t want to try to organize it chronologically; nor by offspring (some didn’t send photos). So, I organized the photos by region of the country.
IPhoto’09 allows you to include a map page in your photobook. In iPhoto, you can tag your photos with the location. The map page then puts a drop pin in every location for which there was a photo. You can then customize the page. I took the names of cities which overlapped on the map, and added a few locations where some of the cousins lived, but no photos were actually taken.
Given the use of this map page, I had a story all ready to go. I called the book “Our Family Everywhere”. The first page shows a drop pin map of where the family offspring are now living.
The next section was two pages full of old slides (now digital photos). I included this section as it was the only way to include photos of family members who neglected to respond to the photo request. This section was called our family way back then.
boring photo
I know this seems a rather blah photo to include, but this is where the storytelling comes in. This is one of the last photos of the old family home which was later demolished. A caption of “bye, bye Crescent St.” tells it all.
The next few sections covered our family all over different regions of the country. The people in the photos somewhat overlapped as family members went on vacations to see each other. This kind of hid the fact that some people were in 15 photos and some were in only one. Had the book been organized by family member, it would have been quite obvious who had helped out with the gift. I made sure to include funny captions on each page to enhance the story.
I’m quite sure there will still be the usual counting of how many times someone is in the book, and hurt feelings to deal with later, but I’m quite pleased that I pulled this off in just a few days.
The next step for this project is attaching a licensed music soundtrack and exporting a .mov file directly from iPhoto. I can then put the “book” on my Cloudfire account for out of town relatives to view. “What’s that?” you say. How do you put a book on a website? Well, iPhoto allows you to export each page of the book with a page flip transition as a movie. So it looks like someone is flipping the pages of the book for you. Cool, huh?
One last thing. If you are going to try to assemble a personalized photobook in one or two days, don’t try to do it by committee. Go with the photos you already have on hand, or can quickly scan. I wouldn’t ask anyone’s opinion of the final product (except for typos) unless you want to redo the project about 20 times and miss your deadline.
So, don’t lose hope. Apple gives you until December 18th to order the photobook. Oops, just double-checked, Kodak is now giving you until December 19th to order a book. Snapfish is giving you until December 17th. Winkflash didn’t list a deadline on their site. These dates are for the standard shipping prices. You can do it! Just add a comment if you need some last minute help.
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