Wanting to make a digital photo book?

                                Photo courtesy of Shutterfly

Do you ever get those photobook offers and think about making one?  I do but I always struggle with the worry that somehow the company I choose won't produce a good book.  And what if I can't figure out the site?  Or it doesn't load the photos easily?  And the dreaded margins?  What if I mess those up?

Worry no more, as the two following sites have reviewed the various photo book printing companies IN DEPTH.  The companies looked at were:

AdoramaPix
ArtsCow
Blurb
Heritage Makers
InkUBook
Kodak Gallery
Mpix
MyPicTales
MyPublisher
Persnickety/LifePics
Picaboo
PhotobookCanada
Photoworks
Scrapping Simply/Paper Kiwi
Shutterfly
Snapfish
Treasure-Book.com
Viovio
Winkflash

The Daily Digi review is primarily for digital scrapbookers who have already made layouts and now want to make a book out of them.  So, theirs was an emphasis on how to get your cover, spine, and layouts loaded into the book and resized properly.  A lot of great tips as well as ratings for intimidation factors, ease of loading photos, shipping, etc. is shown.  A quick, yet thorough, write-up that gets to the heart of the matter.

You can see it here:  Review of Photobooks at thedailydigi.com

Digital Home Thoughts has an extremely detailed review of twelve companies, telling all about his experiences using each site, problems and or complications that arose and final results.  This is a post of 15,000 words so when I say detailed, I mean detailed.  He has screen shots to illustrate his points along the way.  For ease of use, he provided direct links to each company at the beginning of the post so you can just skip to the company you want to check out.  The author said it took him 6 months to do the write-up.

You can check that out here:  Who Makes the Best Photobooks? at DigitalHome Thoughts

There is some overlap with the companies reviewed between the two sites but both are worthy to check out as the descriptions do vary.  I admire the depth of research undertaken to create these photobooks and do the write-ups.  What a great service to everyone!  Thank you, thedailydigi.com and Digital Home Thoughts!

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More iphone Digital Scrapbooking Apps

This must be a new trend! Recently, I posted about Scrapbooks, Etc. new iphone digital scrapbooking app (see THIS POST). Now, I found another site with digital scrapbooking apps for the iphone. See this video below for more info on how it works!

Project 365 KOTM Downloads & Other Kits

Becky Higgins has posted some free digital downloads on her blog to soothe down the people who weren't able to get her Project 365 kit. Very smart move, Becky! These are really nice digi elements - 4x6 inserts, journaling blocks, "week of" title blocks, "it's a wrap", "project 365 title block, etc. They are in a .jpg format which will allow both digi and non-digi scrapper to use them, as you can always take a .jpg and place it into a word document and just print. Head over to Becky's blog HERE and pick up your free downloads.

If you are doing the Project 365 and want to see other digi elements/templates, etc. from other designers, go over HERE to digishoptalk.com and within this thread, there are tons of previews of available kits. I love how this site is like a clearinghouse for all kinds of digi things - people will ask about different types of kits (Valentine's, for example) and a whole thread with links will appear - talk about one-stop shopping! LOVE IT!

Digital ATCs

Got some cute kits from ScrapArtist and Scrapgirls and made this digital ATC - my first digi ATC. I really like it but I do want to add some words to it. Maybe I can turn it into a hybrid digi ATC by adding other embellies and words.

Love the background - not sure how I did it except that I started with an ATC background from ScrapArtist and then fooled around with the different options on PSE until I got it the way I wanted it to look. Sometimes when I do digi layouts, I don't even know how I got it to look the way it does as I just keep fooling with it.

My only wish was that baby was smiling....