The Dreaded Baby / Family Photo Books- How to quickly make them and save money on them, too

I am not one to stay on top of taking photos, sending them to the store for printing, buying photo albums, picking up those photos, organizing them in the albums and then writing captions next to each photo. Oh, and what about buying all of the cute little embellishments to actually make them look nice?

Yeah. In our house, it doesn’t happen.

The one thing I can manage is to make online photobooks through sites like Shutterfly.

And I do this once a year.  And at a major discount. Here’s how.

I take the majority of my photos with my phone. Once the memory fills, I transfer the photos onto my computer and into labeled files. Sometimes as vague as “Summer 2014” and I dump all of the photos taken within those three months into there.

When it’s time to make a photobook, I choose the photos that I want for the book and upload them into Shutterfly. I am talking hundreds. And hundreds.

I used to make books more frequently when the babes were smaller. Now I just make one  book documenting an entire year.

Shutterfly lets you either create a book on your own choosing where the photos are placed, how many photos you want on each page, what the design of the page would look like, etc. Or, you can let them autofill the book for you by date of the photo. This all depends how much time you have and how much effort you want to put into it.

I tend to take the longer route since I only do this once a year and I try to cram as many photos onto a page as I can. All in all, it takes about a week of working on it an hour an evening.

But then, I am DONE!

And with some strategy, you can purchase these at a very discounted rate as well.

I don’t buy my books until Shutterfuly offers 50% off photobooks, which they do throughout the year. They ALSO often offer free shipping on orders of over $30 and often times offer these deals simultaneously. This deal is going on RIGHT NOW until the 24th of this month. Get to it!

And THEN I check RetailMeNot.com and look for discounts there. This last time I found a $10 off coupon that worked with the other discounts. Here is the code I used that is good until the 30th of this month.

So, I got 50% off, free shipping and $10 off my order that consisted of two 99 (YES! You read that correctly, 99!) page hard cover 8 1/2 x 11 photo books (one for each kid). Below you can see the total of the original purchase, and then the discounts applied.

So in perspective, I got both of my kids a photo album that includes hundreds of photos, a hard cover and written captions for less than $60 that isn’t bulky or a space hog.

I call that a DEAL!

Here are some pages from the book I just ordered.

You’re welcome!

Thanks for stopping by!