I decided to gather together all of my daughters baby photos and have them printed into a book as a keepsake. I do have an album of her photos but since 'scrapbooking' has become popular I find that traditional photo albums look old and boring compared to what scrapbooker's are producing these days.
So why don't I whip out all the photos form my album and scrapbook them? Good question ... I don't have the time and I personally find scrapbooking really really fiddly.
This is where Photobox comes in. Photobox have some brilliant 'scrapbook' style photobooks on their website that you can personalise and there is no glue involved !
I registered for a free account on http://www.photobox.co.uk/ and chose which style of photobook I would like from the huge range available. Do not worry if you 'don't have a clue' as they have a guide to give you inspiration http://www.photobox.co.uk/content/do-it-with-a-photobook
I chose the baby style as featured in the image at the top of this page. You get a choice of layouts and you can preview each style, this is quite a handy feature as depending on your type/style of photographs you can find a layout to suit.
Following the instructions I started to upload my photos to 'my account', this seemed to take forever as even though I had chosen a 26 page book ... I didn't know how many photos it would hold and so didn't know how many to upload.
After about an hour all my photos were ready to use, I know an hour seems a little long ... but the time will depend on your Internet connection speed and also how busy the Photobox site is.
To add your photos to the pages is really really easy - you just drag and drop them into the spaces. You can resize and move each image around until you are happy with the presentation. I only had to tweak a few photos as the rest looked brilliant straight away.
There is also a guide as to how 'good' your image is, is it too light or dark? in focus? fuzzy? not a good upload etc... this tells you how clear the image will be once printed in the book.
A brilliant feature (which other personalised product photo sites do not offer) is that as you use each photo it puts a tick next to it - so that you do not accidentally use the same image twice. I found this fantastic as I had used another site to make a calender and I got very muddled with my images - Photobox was a much much easier set up to use.
You have te option to add captions and to remove the Photobox logo from the back page.
http://www.photobox.co.uk/content/the-book-of-wonders this link shows an example of the types of fonts, colours and sizes you can use to annotate your personalised photobook.
The photobook's are printed on 170gsm gloss paper, I am actually really impressed with the finish as it is a good quality hard wearing book. The images are bright and clear which I am surprised at as we didn't use the best quality camera back in 2000 to take them. You can tell the difference between the camera used on our later photos as they have come out a little less grainy ... so if your photos are good quality you will be seriously impressed with the printing quality of the book.
Each book will take around 5 working days to be delivered, so if you are ordering for a Christmas present then I would order as soon as possible in the run-up to Christmas to make sure it is here on time. I ordered mine on a Tuesday night and it was delivered to me on the Saturday - so they can be pretty quick!
The prices vary depending on what you order: style, size, how many pages, etc.... I didn't find the pricing very clear which was a big downside. I did get a little worried about costing and so chose the Classic A4 Photobook (basic one) this was £22.99 + postage.
I am really really happy with my Photobox Photobook, it is something this I will treasure and I hope my daughter will too.
My rating: 9/10
