Travel Tuesday: One for the Books

I will return to photo dumps next week - probably.  It is no secret that I take a lot of photos and nearly every trip, is a photo opportunity.  I returned from Iceland with over 1,600 photos between two cameras and my phone.  

I started having photo books printed back in 2011, after a trip to Normandy.  I had three copies printed of that one, and gave two as gifts.  The rest of these are one-offs.  

What do I do with them?  People are forever saying, show me the photos from your trip. I could hand them my phone as everything is now in a couple of cloud servers. Face it, phones make a lousy photo viewing platform, one stray touch of the screen you you have gone from Normandy, to Ireland, to Iceland. A printed book is much easier, and allows the viewer to point at a photo and ask a questions, and not trigger a five minute search for the photo they were pointing to. I sometimes pull the books down to remind myself, that there is life outside these four walls.  

I have used several services over the years.  Shutterfly, has artsy - scrapbook style templates. Shutterfly is easy to use, and relatively inexpensive.  You have to select and upload the images.  Shutterfly makes adding text easy.  A couple of these were printed by Zno, I have to admit their print quality is outstanding, they are also the most expensive.  If you find a deal on their "little black book" 20 professional style images for $20 or $30 that is a good buy.  Zno prints in China, so delivery can be slow. One was printed by Blurb, they offer lower cost, soft cover.  Like shutterfly with Zno and Blurb you have to upload the photo files.  Two of these were printed by Google.  If you are an Android user, or use Blogspot, you can click to have your photos backed up in Google Photo.  Go into Google photo, find the print store (shopping bag or purse icon) and the photo books are there.  If Google knows you have been traveling, it will often arrange your photos into a book for you.  You can edit that book taking out images you don't want, adding ones you do. It will warn you of duplicates (something the other platforms don't do.) You can add pages, you can change the photo from framed, to full bleed.  You can create composite pages.  There is a limited ability to add text. Google's books are printed in the same city in South Carolina as Shutterfly, maybe in the same print shop.  

The one from Iceland 2023, is 100 pages, 9-inch by 9-inch, hard cover, and is the most expensive I have done, it was $115 with shipping.  Ouch, but it is a nice book and it was dumb easy to do.