Shutterfly Albums!

I recently ordered two Shutterfly photo albums for a number of reasons:

1) I'm considering designing a wedding album through them for all of our wedding pro photos.

2) I have ALLL these pictures from showers, bachelor(ette) parties, our honeymoon, cake tastings, dress fittings, etc. that were just begging to be used for something.

3) Groupon had a great coupon for Shutterfly photo books.

So I made one "Engagement" album containing everything from the day we got engaged until the day before our wedding, and I made one "Honeymoon" album with our Jamaica photos. I ended up getting the Honeymoon one FREE (via an emailed coupon for a free 20-page 8x8 photo book), and the other one for $10 + $1/page over 20 (via the Groupon offer).

I thought I'd share some photos of the books on here for anyone who is considering ordering through Shutterfly. I was very, very happy with the quality overall (especially for the price!!).

The Engagement Book:

Shutterfly has about a gazillion backgrounds, page layouts, fonts, and photo borders you can choose from for each page.

You can see in this next photo that the pages have page #s. I thought that was kind of odd, but there didn't appear to be a way to get rid of them. Anyone know if you can or not?

One of the things I don't so much like is the bar code on the back... I'm not sure what it's purpose is, and it kind of ruins the look of the book.

The spine printing turned out quite nicely, except that it's slightly below center. I think a smaller font size would have fixed it.

And here's the Honeymoon book. Again, the spine printing was a little too low.

Other than that, the book is great!

I tried to do this book with more text so I could include some of our memories from the trip.

Shutterfly books have to have at least 20 pages, so when our Honeymoon photos only used 17, I had to add a few pages of us opening our wedding gifts right after we got home. Haha.

Again with the barcode.

All things considered, I LOVE these books. The print quality of the pictures was perfect, and the pages are high-quality feeling. I think I'm going to email customer service at Shutterfly to ask about removing the bar code and page #s before I order our wedding album through them. As long as there's a way to get rid of those two things, it looks like our wedding photos will be in a 12x12 (bigger than these... these are 8x8) album from Shutterfly. We're even asking for Shutterfly gift certificates for Christmas to help pay for it. :) I'll of course make the wedding one look less playful than these. Probably solid black backgrounds with very little text (and not too many of those crazy layouts with ten crooked photos).

Why am I doing our album this way rather than getting a fancy, expensive one? First of all, I want our wedding album to be something I can sit on our coffee table. I want people to feel free to pick it up and flip through it. I DON'T want it to be something we paid hundreds of dollars for that we have to be careful with. I don't want to freak out if one of my little cousins gets it and tears a page or something. 

Also, I want to reserve the right to update it if it goes "out of style." I figure, what looks good on a coffee table now won't be considered attractive in a decade or two, and I want to be able to update our album later so we can continue to have it out for years to come. If I would have paid for the fancy one through the photographer, I don't think I'd be able to justify buying a new one later. 

And thirdly, I think this sort of thing is fun. I enjoyed designing these two books, even though I did them pretty quickly (my Groupon was expiring and I wanted them before the holidays!). I'm looking forward to putting my own work into designing our wedding album and placing the pictures. I plan on taking my time to do it and making it exactly what I want. You don't have as much control over a photographer-made album.

What do you think? Have you ever ordered a photo album and loved it? Do you know if I can get rid of the bar code and page #s? What sort of wedding album do you have?