My discount Snapfish photobook arrive in the mail yesterday. I have prepared and ordered photobooks via Snapfish before so I was confident it would be good and in fact it was great. Mainly because it forced me to documented in a physical way something that had up to then only existed in the virtual world.
This little book is mainly based on images that became popular (lots of views and favorites) via flickr’s Explore feature. There are a lot of purist and armchair warrior's that criticise this interestingness based logarithmic selection feature, that‘s ok they are entitled to, providing they explain their reasons (which few do). However I feel a little pride in having photos selected (sometimes I don’t understand the appeal of a specific image) so having them in a physical format is even more satisfying.
The real important observation for me, there is no longer any reason why you can’t take some of your photographs, particular those ones your are proud of and crate a personal photobook. Giving them a more permanent place to exist, because on the glutted stream of social media “photographs” they will soon be forgotten and lost. If your worried about cost. Prepare then now (particularly select the collection of photos to use and the rough layout) and then just wait for a decent discount offer.
My Third Photobook (the third 100) in the series of this year Daily Photo Project arrived today. I love these little 20cm square books from Snapfish (especially when I can get them at a discount).They are easy to share and have the benefit of being physical, compared with Instagram or a flickr album. However they were made directly from my Daily Photo flickr album (so the process was easy).
If you haven’t made a photobook yet, Put together some favourite photos now (that’s the hardest part) and Then drop hints or even directly ask for a gift voucher to create a photobook for Christmas. Starting with the small economical books like my 20 by 20cm size from snapfish is a great way to start.
Its so long since I made my last photobook, on checking it was only 20 month ago, but the process is somewhat streamlined and the on-line service I will be using, Snapfish (*), is different enough to need a little retraining. Snapfish are actually having a current TV Campaign for Father’s Day and have a simple soft cover book with 20 pages being advertised for $10. This this is a good price to let me experiment, before I tackle a bigger volume of my recent trip.
The TV ad and online videos suggest you can make a photobook in 10 minutes and you can,
but there are a couple of IFs.
You need to have the photos you wish to use already organized and ready to upload.
Be aware the quick set up involves autofill layout, where the snapfish service will automatically do a best fit of all you photos into the available space using a variety of layouts. Its not bad BUT I needed a little more grouping and continuity of theme.
Since this is a practice run I rolled up my sleeves and spent part of an afternoon moving photos around and adjusting layouts. The first step was to load the photos and snapfish can upload directly from flickr and better still do a group upload from a flickr album. Since I already have my daily photos going into an album this made the upload very straight forward. On the left hand side snapfish has a film roll/tray which they call the photo well and this is loaded with your photos. You then simply choose a template and drag the photos into place (if you don’t want to use autofill). As you use a photo the tick icon, on the lower right of the photo, turns blue to keep track of what photos you have already placed in the book. Since this book is based on my first 100 daily photos (that lets me average 5 photos per page which seemed a reasonable number). so it was a challenge keeping track of the photos already placed, since the photo well only display 16-20 thumbnails at a time. So I used the the “Hide used photos” found under the options icon. Whilst the software and its template layouts aren’t bad it does lack a few alignment tools (they flash up occasionally but I could not find a means to turn them on permanently while I was working). So I had to trust my eye for some key alignments. Otherwise the set up was easy and I soon got the hang of the best approach, which was to have a few photo in the get photo well (aka tray area) and drag them onto suitable looking layouts, and if necessary use autofill just on a blank page as you add the photos.
Adjusting layouts to incorporate extra photos is where you can spend a lot of time. So it is worth (re)watching these snapfish’s editing tutorials. Ordering the book was super simple and I won’t go into that here.
PS: Why Snapfish (*), It’s the service I’ve used before. For a long while snapfish was the only service in Australia that you could get flickr photos printed. That built in service was discontinued when flickr released their own (expensive) photo books. Most importantly Snapfish has always done a decent job on my photos, I am careful to have all images in higher quality jpeg (>80% quality) and in the sRGB colour space and appropriate ressolution (2000+ pixel on the longest axis is fine for the typical small photo book). Finally they are reasonably priced on both printing and postage.
I have come to accumulate a lot of very early family photographs and they are still in reasonable condition (some aren’t more on that in another post). The biggest challenge is figuring out who is who (picasa face recognition is helping but it does a fair bit of grouping parents with their children and mixing siblings etc) and getting things organized, and working out safe storage. Not such hard task but time is required. However I have begun to imagine what a horrendous task this might be for future generations that might suddenly find themselves with a few million digital photos many in camera specific RAW format, spread across a number of the by then outdated USB external drives or in a massive zipped conglomerations plucked from a social media web service just before it shut down. The solution to ensuring a future of family photo legacy is simple, just make prints of your favourite photos. Print those important family photos now!
This brings me to how to get those prints of all your social media post (the ones you really want) onto prints (or photobooks). A couple of years ago that could have been expensive but several services are gearing up to make that more affordable. Services like Big W, Harvey Norman and Ted’s camera have kiosks that will let to log into a number of popular social sites, like facebook and instagram. On-line service like shutterfly and snapfish (there are plenty of others) offer some compatibility to pull out images from your social photostreams. However often these will probably have been resized to suit fast web display and might not be able to be printed much larger than 10 by 15 cm (4 by 6”).
Whilst I do have my own ink jet printers (yes I have a few including a decent older HP photosmart with 12 ink colours but now I’m having difficulty getting the ink cartridges) I usually get prints made from an on-line service such as snapfish. The reality is they are cheaper by the time you consider the ink and paper costs (and less frustration) up to about the A4 size. Current prices of the better deals should be around 15 cents for a 10 by 15cm up to just over $5 for an A4. Many services still offer the 10” by 8” inch size as the largest mass processing option at around the $5 mark. These are the size ranges that will suit most family legacy collections anyway.
I notice that snapfish are heavily advertising unlimited 6 cent prints at the moment on TV and this is a great deal to start you family legacy project. If you miss this deal just keep your eye out for other similar offers, many services offer 50 to 100 prints free when you sign up. This lead me to look at printing from flickr (which I have done previously to snapfish on many occasions but the links from your photostream now go to the more expensive wall art and photo book services offered by flirkr itself. However creating prints is still there in the organizr tool under the print and create tab. You need to scroll past the wall art and photo book option and then you will find other options, including prints. In Australia the only non flickr photo services come from snapfish.
My discount Snapfish photobook arrive in the mail yesterday. I have prepared and ordered photobooks via Snapfish before so I was confident it would be good and in fact it was great. Mainly because it forced me to documented in a physical way something that had up to then only existed in the virtual world.
