Congrats to Gwyneth, who blogs over at Travelgoon – I hope this prize helps her catch up on documenting her family’s travel as it has done for me.
Having a family travel blog means that I document just about everything to do with every place that I go with my children. You’d think this would mean my family had a treasure trove of memories to take out and examine whenever they want to. But the sad fact is that I’m notoriously bad about stepping outside the virtual realm and making scrapbooks or photo albums for my kids. And since they don’t yet have their own computers (and I’m always on mine, writing blog posts) they rarely get a chance to share in all of the travel stories and pictures. For this reason, today I’m dreaming of being more diligent about documenting family trips in ways that are more accessible to my children. And since they both love to read, what could be better than to create our own customized picture books? If only I could do this easily….
You know what’s coming next right? I’m a long-time fan of Shutterfly and have been using them for prints, calendars, photo books, as well as all our family Christmas cards since Tommy was born in 2002. I find their site easy to use and have always been pleased with the quality of the photos, their prices, and the speed with which everything arrived. So when I was offered a chance to check out how to make one of their new Custom Path photo books and given one for free, you can imagine I jumped at it.
Here are a few of the things I especially liked about the new Custom Path:
It’s fast (really fast). If you want to, you can simply upload the photos you’d like to use from your Shutterfly account, your computer, or from Facebook, pick a template you like, and the software will insert the pictures in the order they were taken (obviously this works well if you want the book to go in chronological order). Another option is to put the pictures in the page order you want using the storyboard feature, which allows you to group selected pictures on each page. Hit a button, and the software puts all the pictures into a layout for you to play with. I found that often I liked the layout of the pages, although they are completely customizable if you don’t. And if you prefer, you can always put the pictures in yourself.
The templates are attractive. I used the Bon Voyage template for my book because I wanted to make one for our trip to England last summer and it had some fun details available like the British flag. There are two more templates intended specifically for travel and a bunch of other options if you want to step outside that box. I really liked the small details like a compass or arrow that I could add to the pages to dress them up.
You can use a fadeout of one your own photos as a background. I loved using my own pictures as background for some of the pages!
You are free to add as much – or as little – text as you want. If you want this to be more of a narrative account, you can share stories. Prefer it to be simply a photo album? The layouts work that way too. I chose to add short text that I knew the boys would enjoy.
Like what you see? Well I’ve got some good news. This week I’m giving away a 20-page, 8×8 Custom Path photo book from Shutterfly.
Here’s how to enter: Simply leave a comment below saying what trip you’d use the book to document (past or future). Or, if you’ve got a Monday Dream of your own to share, go ahead and do it in the comments, and I’ll count that as an entry. For a bonus, if you tweet about the giveaway and @motherofalltrip I’ll throw in another entry for you. Nice and easy, just like making my photo book was.
A few conditions:
- One comment per person please. Anonymous or duplicate comments will not be included in the drawing.
- The contest is open to everyone, but if you live outside the United States you’ll have to pay the difference in shipping (shipping for a U.S. winner is free).
- You have until 5 p.m. EST on Friday May 27 to enter. The winner will be chosen at random from all the eligible entries.
Good luck to everyone! Happy Monday dreaming. And thank you to Shutterfly both for making this giveaway possible and for getting me to finally document our trip to England in non-virtual format. (Disclosure: I also got a free photo book. But I really was a satisfied Shutterfly customer before – and they didn’t ask me to say so.)
I've taken with my children and those I want to take. Explore and you'll find family travel tips, information about vacation destinations, and lots of stories about our adventures! 
We’ll be spending a week at the Jersey Shore in August with my parents-in-law and sister-in-law’s family, all staying under one roof. Great aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents will also make an appearance, I’m sure. An extended-family-week-at-the-beach was an annual tradition in my husband’s family but this year will be the first time we’ve managed to do it since the newest generation started popping up five years ago. With five new kids in the family, I’d love to document our vacation in an album and maybe give copies as Christmas presents!
I’d love to create a video of a trip I took with my dad to Long Beach Island. We haven’t had a father/daughter trip since I was little and it’d be a nice present for father’s day!
I’d love to finally document a trip to Lebanon. I have yet to make one even though I have been 3 times with the kids.
(and then maybe this will encourage me to start making REAL photo albums… something I have not done since my oldest was born 6 years ago!)
What a beautiful book you created Mara! I’d love to give this book to my 11yo son – he’s just recently turned into a photo lover, and we’ll be working with him this summer to create some photo books of our neighborhood and city.
As I have mentioned here before, we would love to take our girls to Atlantis in the Bahamas. I would love to make a book of that trip!
I gave up on scrapbooks about three years ago. I think my kids miss having them to look at. Maybe this format is the inspiration I need! I can see making some great books from our current trip and from many of our past ones as well.
I’d love to create a book of the last 14 months traveling through Latin America.
I’d love to use this for our annual trip to the family cabin in Yosemite National Park. We go every year & take TONS of photos, but I have yet to put them together in an album. This sounds perfect.
I would certainly use the book to gather images both my daughter and I took in Africa last year which need to see the light of day far more often!
I have been a loyal fan of Shutterfly for a long time. When we lost our photos on our hard drive, thanks to the photos I uploaded to Shutterfly we still have decent amount of pictures.
I would love to create a photo book for our family trip to Thailand.
I haven’t done much with thousands of pictures we took yet.
So glad to hear that it’s a fast process to make a photo book.
I’ve visited Japan 3 times in the past year and have the most gorgeous photos, from the ancient temples of Kyoto to scenes of Mt. Fuji to wearing a kimono. It would look like an actual storybook if I were to use Shutterfly’s book to group the best of the photos together.
I would document our trip to Germany that we took last fall.
I recently did two: Malaysia last summer and our skiing trip in January. Next up is our Summer vacation of 2009, then…. Oh, the backlog! But hey, I made a start…, and I do love the results.
I love these photo books~ so easy to make and to keep all the photos together in a beautiful layout!
We’re thinking about going to Disney next fall. If it happens, that’s the trip I’d document!