the best of 2015: a photo book


traditionally, at the mark of a new year, i share my top favorite memories of the previous year with you. (here are my favorites from 2014, 2013, 2012 & 2011!) 

this year i changed things up just a bit! in between christmas & the new year, i spent several days collecting photos & making a photo book to mark 2015: a year of adventure for our family! 












i absolutely love how it turned out! 

i have heard great things about artifact uprising, blurb & mpix photo books, but in the end, i chose shutterfly. the shutterfly photo book builder was compatible with facebook & instagram, allowing me to quickly click & place photos in order of when they were shot.  i mostly used snapshots from my phone with a mix of dslr photos & our professional family photos.

i was overall impressed with the quality (shutterfly has greatly improved over the years)! it cost just under $70 & the photos turned out great. i used the white modern theme & a simple grey font. overall, it took me about 10 hours to learn how to properly use the website, gather my photos & build my book. 

i chose small & big moments of our year. i included snapshots of what we baked during the summer & weekly dates with my nephew.  i included photos of our home & our new pool. i chose photos of our loved ones & our family gatherings. it was such a sweet process to relive our europe trip & sort through photos of my grandpa's life in his last few days. 

i cannot wait to share our yearly books with our future babies in years to come.  i'm sure we'll look back & laugh at our haircuts, our outfits, our home decor & why we took so many photos of our feet! 

i'd love to know how you organize & print/share photos every year! please share!
love,
natalie
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6 comments:

Helen said...

I also really love the Shutterfly 'modern' book theme! We print books somewhat sporadically and often use that exact one. We don't do one per year, but tend to do them after trips or a season when we've taken more photos than normal. I really like the size, too. Your book turned out beautifully!

Andy said...

beautiful
i have been creating photo book for 5 or 6 years now
i just finished my mils christmas present (a book of photos from our family christmas)
not i need to finish up our 2015 one. i used blurb one year and loved the book and they layout but had heard that at least once in the year they offer a half off code and the whole year i worked on it and all the way till october of the next year they had not offered a half off code. i finally had to just order it even though it was way way more then i wanted to spent.
excited to get to working on mine again. yours is so pretty

Ashley P. said...

I love Shutterfly! I've received several photo books as gifts and I made one myself from our Monticello trip pictures many years ago. I love the idea of making a yearly book though and I also want to compile all our family favorite recipes into a book as well. So much to do but I think I need a better camera first. ;)

Mary Hopper said...

I try to do one every year, and this year, I went with chatbooks. I linked my instagram account to my chatbooks account, picked the photos that I loved, and printed a beautiful photo book, with one photo per page. I absolutely love it. Your book is very beautiful, I"ll have to consider shutter fly in the future!

Danielle said...

I do the same thing using Blurb! So fun to review the year through photos! My kids love it too!

Courtney H said...

Hello, from a fellow Arkansan! I have a question for you. How do you take such beautifully-exposed photos? All of the photos that you post on your blog are outstanding! What camera do you use and what lenses? How do you choose the settings that you you use? I'm in awe. ;)

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