Our Blurb Family Yearbook for 2016 – Details

A few weeks ago our Blurb family photo album (yearbook) came and since then I haven’t been able to put it down. I keep flipping through the pages and am just continually blown away by the quality and finished product that I’ve been wanting to share with you all!

First- I used Blurb’s BookWright program.  It’s a super self explanatory software that you can use offline to build your book layouts.  You can simply drag and drop photos onto the pages, add text boxes, move stuff around, save layouts and view previews of your book. I promise you it is super user friendly and you won’t be overwhelmed with a million options.  It was also awesome that the software didn’t crash or get stuck like some photo book systems do when you are dealing with large files and tons of photos. Just my two cents.

I did a few things over the course of creating this book that made it easier for me to put the whole thing together:

1. View you photos in iPhoto by date.  I had a little notepad next to me and I could jot down “events” that I’d use as whole pages.  Then on my desktop I created a series of 24 folders- one for each month of the year PLUS an extra one for the Instagram “grid” pages that corresponded to each month in the book (you’ll see these below). This was a simple way for me to add in all the instagram photos I loved but keep them small and confined to one page layout (there are definitely lots of instagram photos used in pages beyond the month titles but you get the idea).
2. I used subfolders inside the month folders on the desktop to drag and drop photo collections from iPhoto.  For example, there are a series of photos I love from a Horse Show we went to while visiting my parents.  I created a “HORSESHOW” folder inside the folder titled “JUNE” and drag and dropped the photos into the corresponding sub folder.
3. Complete all folder organizing BEFORE you start your book. I promise you this will make things SO much easier.
4. Decide on a layout you like for the whole book and stick to it.  The one thing that tied my book together is definitely the Month title pages and instagram grids. It gives the book a nice flow but keeps the rest simple and totally open to whatever layouts I wanted to use in the rest of the book.
5. My last tip- turn on the viewing mode for your photos that only allows you to see the photos you HAVE NOT USED yet.  Trust me this will simplify what you are seeing as you keep adding photos.
6. I lied – one more tip! There are SO many photos that I loved that didn’t meet the resolution requirements and caused little orange exclamation points to pop up. I hit ignore on almost all of them – so many cell phone pics just are never going to have that professional quality high resolution and sharpness but I just crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.  And I wasn’t at all disappointed! The photos still look great.

As far as printing this book – I chose the hardcover photo wrap option (I don’t care for book jackets but to each their own!) and I upgraded to the luxe matte paper.  Definitely an upgrade worth the extra dollars!

Love the feel of the pages. I also ordered the book during their end of year sale which saved me a TON.  I’m hoping to get all the rest of my books made and then just save them up for ordering during the big end of year or black friday sales. Goals! My 128 page hardcover, paper-upgraded book was $124.39.  But with 60%/50%/40% you can see how ordering during a sale can save you HUGE bucks.

Without further adeu- here is our 2016 family photo book yearbook! Hope it inspires you to get your beloved photos off the computer and printed somehow, somewhere. It’s so fun to have these in print to look through with the kids.

Here is what one of these month title pages looks like in the program:

I created the grid myself just dragging and dropping and resizing the photos, then I saved this whole spread as a layout.

And another example of this spread in the program:

This is one of my favorite full spreads of Grace- I so love this photo, the mood, the colors, her little eyes.

Above is an example of a photo that didn’t meet the resolution stipulations, but it looks great!

And a few more final screen grabs of the program:

Hope that helped all of you with questions. PS this post is not sponsored in any way, I just really love the end result and wanted to make sure all of you who were curious got the details!

Have a great Tuesday,

-J