It’s the end of the summer and like most people, I have 100’s of photos trapped on my digital camera and even more on my computer’s hard drive. I like the instant gratification I get from my digital cameras; I no longer need to print off pictures to see what they look like, but if my hard drive crashes, so do all our family memories.

Organizing my family photos has become an onerous task. I am really good at emailing them, but when it comes to printing them off and actually placing them in an album, I am at least five years behind.

Fortunately, there are some really great online solutions for preserving our cottage holiday.

Photo Books are hard cover photo albums that you design online. I can transfer my digital copies directly to the book all from the comfort of my home. I can insert captions or comments, design the layout and chose the theme. It’s kinda like on-line scrap booking, only you end up with a nice coffee table style photo album. I can even put a title on the front of the book, i.e. Horne Lake 2007’s Summer Adventures. The best part - I can order as many of these as I like. One for my collection, one for the kid’s and their grandparents (a nice Christmas present).

The cost to create an 8X8 book starts at $29.99 US. Soft cover ones are cheaper and start at $24.99 Cdn. I would like to do one of these at the end of every summer for our cabin and include all the events and visitors for that season.

There are a number of companies who provide this service: Future Shop Photo, Chapters.Indigo.Photobook, but my favourite company is Shutterfly. They are based in the US but they offer a greater variety of photo books, and I prefer their style selections.

Another option for my photos other than the traditional album is a calendar. Traditionally calendars go from January to December, but I can design one that starts anytime and include lots of cottage photos.

I can also set up my photo album online Flickr.com is probably the best known and most popular online photo sharing site.

I am excited about creating a photo book of our family. If anyone has done one, or has other ideas for storing your digital pictures I would love to hear from you.

Cheers,

Julie

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 at 3:01 pm and is filed under Books, Décor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.