Project 52 into a photo book

Last year’s project "A portrait of my child, once a week, every week in 2013" has been a success! Although I started at week 3 I managed to carry on for the entire year and ended up with more than 52 pictures of Olivia. Between my inexperience and an ever more active toddler, not all of the pictures were great, but some were good enough to make it onto 30x20cm canvases.

But I really wanted a photo book to capture the changes into my daughter’s life throughout a year. Also, each week, together with the picture, I had made a note of some facts about Olivia’s life, her achievements and some funny stories. And I wanted to keep a record of that too.

I decided to go through Photobox, a trusted site I used many time before. The quality of their product is awesome, and if for any reason you are not satisfied, they’ll do whatever they can to meet your expectations.

I chose two different sizes for the books, a square spiral softcover one and a small soft cover one. The first one was for the grandparents, big photos and no text. Because the notes were written in English and they don’t speak English, I thought it was too much effort to translate everything in Italian. But they ended up with about 60 full pages (20x20cm) picturing their beloved granddaughter, and so far they have not complained a bit!

The smaller book was for us to keep. I liked it because it was rectangular (approx. 18x14cm) and perfect for fitting both pictures and text side by side. I used the same layout throughout, except where there was too much text to fit in and in that case I used a double page spread for just one week. Probably a bigger size would have been better, but surely not cheap.

The site was fairly easy to use, I uploaded all the pictures at once, chose the type of book and the layout for the cover and for the inner pages, and the book was automatically created. Of course you can make changes and move things around, change the colour of the background and so on.

To add the text I copied it first from my blog onto a word document, and then manually copied it onto the site in the text box available on each page. A bit tedious but well worth it.

Olivia loves looking at her pictures, and I’m sure she will appreciate reading through my notes once she’ll be old enough to do so.

Disclaimer: This is not a sponsored post. I’m just sharing my experience with Photobox because I love their products and used them many time before.