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Photo Books:Preserving Travel Memories

Shutterfly photo booksComing back from a vacation, one of the most daunting tasks is usually organizing the hundreds of pictures you’ve taken.  We love taking pictures.  They’re tangible reminders of special family memories and have also been used as reference points when we’ve gone back to a destination.  I’ve always loved assembling pictures into photo albums.  I have some that weigh more than a newborn baby.

So, enter the era of photo books to replace the photo albums with the slip through pockets or peeling plastic pages.  They are the online, digital photo albums and scrapbooks that you can print in hard or soft cover in various sizes.  These books have made my life so much easier with organizing travel and family photos. I even recently digitized my wedding album.  So, why put your pictures in a photo book? Here are five reasons:

  1. Compact  & Space Savers – Photo books can be as small as an 8×8 or as big as a 12×12 and are less than half an inch thick even with 45 pages.  They don’t take up much room and can be carried everywhere to share your photos with family and friends.  These take up so much less space on bookshelves.  For a good measure, 6 photo books = 1 standard size photo album.
  2. Be Organized and Creative – You start with blank pages and you can pick your overall theme, font, and page design.  Captions can range from sentences to paragraphs to capture special memories and events.   It’s all up to you to organize them and the extent of your creativity and imagination.  It really is an online digital scrapbook as well. The old photo albums made it a bit difficult to play around with layouts. I have some with no overall theme and pictures randomly stuck in photo pockets.
  3. Kids love them –  My kids love looking through our photo books whether it’s their baby book or any of the vacation books.  It helps trigger some memories for them.  They have worn out our Disney Cruise/Disney World trip album with the countless times they have looked through them.  Being the stars of the books. they love showing them to anyone who visits our house.
  4. Backup – Most of the sites allow pictures to be uploaded to their servers.  This serves as a back up of your pictures indefinitely.  If anything were to happen to the photo books, they will also always be available for re-ordering.
  5. Online Sharing – Let’s face it, we also take a lot of pictures to show them off to family and friends.  If the grandparents live across the country, no problem.   Many of the sites allow you to share your photo books with friends and relatives online or allow them to order an extra copy.

Shutterfly photo books

At the risk of sounding like a Shutterfly stockholder, this is our personal favorite site.  All our photo books were created here and we have never been disappointed.  There is no software to download on the computer.   Everything is on their website so you can work on them from virtually anywhere.  They have a vast array of templates to stimulate your creativity and inspire you.  You can also use Picasa by Google to assemble collages and upload those to your pages to fit more pictures.

Money Saving tip: Never ever pay full price for a photo book regardless of the site you end up using to make them. Be sure to always scour the Internet for a promo code. Most usually have free shipping for spending a certain amount. We’ve finished a photo book and waited until we got at least a 40% off promo before ordering them. If your family trip pictures are still inside shoe boxes or memory cards, be organized and get your creative juices flowing with photo books.

Shutterfly Photo book

Here are five of my favorite tips based on Shutterfly’s ideas for preserving travel memories and assembling photo books.

  1. Let everyone in the family take turns when taking pictures to have varying perspectives. Kids are great with the cameras.
  2. Take pictures of the trip from start to finish. The “journey begins the moment you leave home, not when you get to your destination.” Shoot away and candid shots are very much welcome.
  3. Use your smart phone and its various apps to take pictures during the trip and upload them to Twitter or Facebook to update family and friends. These can also be included in your photo books later on.
  4. Ask family members to create a Top 5 or 10 word list (or phrases) to describe the trip.  These can be used to design or be incorporated into the photo book designs.
  5. Design pages in the photo book as a family project to display everyone’s creativity and personality.

Click here to look at one of our photo books (a wedding anniversary trip without the kids).

59 thoughts on “Photo Books:Preserving Travel Memories”

  1. We love photo books too. Online publishers like Shutterfly and Mixbook make it easy for non-crafters like me to make our memories look great. Groupon is also a good way to periodically get great deals on photo books. I would love to make a photo book for our Black Hills, South Dakota road trip. Fingers crossed!

  2. This is wonderful – such great advice & beautiful books! We’re planning a road trip this summer, so I’d use a free photo book to document that. Thanks!

  3. What a great idea! I have boxes of pictures that I have yet to put into albums- plus hundreds of pictures on my hard drive that I have yet to print because I just don’t know what to do with them. I love to take pictures and we love to look back on our trips as a family and reminisce. I’d love to win a photo book and add pictures from our trip to Alaska last year. Thanks for the tips! :) I have a feeling our shelves will soon be full of photo books! :)

  4. I used to be a huge scrapbooker, and then I became a blogger:) There just isn’t
    time for both, but I would love to make a photo book that centers around a
    particular trip to keep for a memory. I know the kids would love that.

  5. Great tips, Mary! I have always printed my photos and kept them in albums, however, I am about to try Shutterfly for the first time. I’m a little nervous about how it will turn out because I’m not a very creative person when it comes to design and making things look pretty. Wish me luck!!

    1. Thanks Lisa! Shutterfly has a custom path and a simple path so they make things pretty easy for you. The templates are awesome. Would love to see your finished product.

  6. You are so organized–and I am totally jealous! :-) I loved seeing all your fun photo books. Great tips, too. I have made a few photo books before, but none yet for travel. If I were to make one, I’d commemorate my baby’s first road trip to St. George, Utah!

    1. Thanks Andi! I’m actually a couple of years behind with the photo books. I’m still trying to catch up on my kids’ photo books. That first road trip will make for a fun photo book.

  7. This giveaway couldn’t have come at a better time! We just returned home from a trip
    to Japan and I was wondering how I wanted to preserve the memories. Thanks, hope I win!

  8. I love your tips! Such great memories. I need to share this with my sister, she is on a three week trip in Europe and will have a lot of memories to preserve.

  9. I’ve been doing Shutterfly for years but still need to get my California trip from last summer into book form. I also assemble a book and then wait until a discount inevitably pops up, unless I’m on a time crunch for gift-giving reasons. A few years ago, I gave a copy of our vacation album to my parents so they could enjoy it, too. For the meantime, I’ll have to have Shutterfly ship to my house in the U.S. and then wait until I visit home to see it. There are photo book places here in Malaysia, but you have to physically go to their store do all the uploading and layout on their computer. It’s definitely not as convenient as doing it at home.

  10. I have one photo book from our trip to the Galapagos. I love the fact that we actually take it out and look at photos.You have some great tips in there and if I was to win (I have a US destination address!)I would put together a book of our recent trip to South Carolina and Georgia.

  11. Congrats on your first giveaway, Mary. What a neat idea! Thanks for putting this together.
    You have some fabulous books and photos.
    I just did my first photo book, loved doing it so now i’m ready to convert all my photos.

  12. Such a great post – and I love your tips! And HOLY COW have you made alot of photo books, girl – LOL!!

    I’ve made a few, and Shutterfly are very nice quality, probably my favorite. :) I’ve been meaning to “dig out” (they are on an older computer at home) my daughter’s baby pix and make a photo book… so that’s what I’d love to make with this prize!

    Thanks for the neat giveaway. :)

    Tami

    1. Thanks Tami! I wish I had to make more books to catch up on life and travels. I’ve been meaning to do the same for my daughter. Good luck!

  13. Hi Mary! I have always loved putting together scrapbooks. I have been a scrapbooker for many, many years and just recently switched over to all digital and absolutely LOVE how many more pictures I can put on a page without losing the picture through cutting. I have never actually tried any of the online sites like Shutterfly because Creative Memories does digital so I just moved to their digital forum and I enoy the flexibility and vast variety I get from them. I know I will be scrapbooking my upcoming California trip :). Love the advice!

  14. Thank you Amy! Photo books are great for kids. I love that you can create so many designs and ones that appeal to them. With all the places you’ve been to, it would be a a great and huge one.

  15. I especially love the tip about allowing everyone in the family be a photographer,
    what a great way to include everyone and get different perspectives at the same time.

  16. Debbie Beardsley @ European Travelista

    I did an album like this for my parents 60th wedding anniversary. I can say it was fun but not something I wanted to look at again for a few months after finishing the project! You have inspired me to try it again after my next trip. I also enjoyed your tips especially about letting everyone be a photographer and asking for words to describe the trip.

  17. I would love to make a photo book of my daughter’s 1st year. She’s almost one and had a bit of a rough start to life, so I’d like for here to have a book full of all the achievements she’s had in such a short time. And I love Shutterfly to boot!

  18. I actually made a photo book of our first family trip to Disneyworld last year.
    My sons were 3 yr old and 6 month old, so I would love to get them copies of the
    book that I made so they will have it to take with them when they leave home (a long,
    long time from now :D )
    Thank you for the chance to win! I’ve wanted to get them, but on the list of financial
    priorities, it’s pretty low.
    Thanks!

  19. My book will be filled with non-travel photos of my kids. I figure my travel blog documents our journeys well enough. It’s the other stuff – the day-to-day fun, school events & other accomplishments I’d love to record.

  20. I have a girls’ group at church and this would be a great way to document all of our activities. throughout the year.

  21. Paula Michele Hafner

    I would fill it with pictures of my kids from this last fall and winter. We took a family trip as well as did some other fun things!

    hafner611{AT}gmail{DOT}com

  22. I’d love to organize a whole bunch of family photos — especially digital ones that never got printed! Thanks!

  23. I would make a book of my 4 kids for my husband’s grandpa.He has not met 2 of our children and is going through a rough time since he just lost his wife of 30 years.Thanks!
    lstanziani(at)yahoo(dot)com

  24. I have a collection of my son in various costumes (he has a ton of them because he loves to dress up. I would create a book out of those photos.

  25. Love it! I would like to make a book for my daughter’s first birthday party, which is coming up soon. I made one of these books with her younger baby pictures and loved it!

    Thanks!

    fs4sarah at gmail dot com

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