Thursday, January 31

review: our BLURB book!

Y'all, I have a confession to make:  I am a wedding photo slacker.  Those of you who've been following this blog since my wedding may remember that our photographer shot our wedding in RAW so that Mr. Q and I could edit the images ourselves.  It saved money, and let us be the perfectionists that we are.  However, once I'd edited all of the images I liked (with help from the mister) and uploaded them to Facebook and this blog... I kind of got tired of looking at them.  Too much time spent adjusting the brightness and contrast, perhaps?

They just sat there on Mr. Q's hard drive.  We didn't get any prints made.  We didn't make an album, although I had in the back of my mind that I wanted to make albums for our parents.

Finally, this Christmas rolled around, our SECOND newlywed Christmas, and it seemed ridiculous that we hadn't given our parents any wedding photos yet!  I remembered reading several brides' reviews of different album-making services on Weddingbee, so I hopped on over there for some comparison research.  My search led me to Jason Dunn's "Great Photo Book Round-Up Review," and based on what I read there and on Weddingbee, I chose Blurb to create our book.


We used Blurb's BookSmart software to create our album.  It's a 32-page 10 x 8 inch landscape format hardcover with Imagewrap, which means the front and back cover pictures are printed directly onto the book rather than a dust jacket.  The spine is printed with the title and date.


BookSmart is really easy to use - it reminded me of the software we used in high school for our newspaper and yearbook because we were able to choose from a variety of templates and then drag the images into the boxes.  We chose not to add any text in our parent albums because our parents already know what's happening and who is in every picture!  We chose the standard papers and the quality is nice for books that might be getting flipped through quite a bit.



Our parents were really excited to get the albums for Christmas; since these were the "family" albums we chose to include a lot of pictures of family members who were involved in the wedding.  Mr. Q's sister in law even got her own page.  I have to say, we felt really accomplished to have created a BOOK!


The finished product was $34.50 each plus shipping, which we thought was really reasonable, especially compared to some of the other online photo book services.  I like the ease, cost, and quality so much, that we will probably just add more pictures and use the same basic format again for our own wedding album.  I am very happy with our Blurb book.


Brides-to-be and newlywed, are you planning on ordering a wedding album?

Disclaimer:  I was not paid or compensated in any way for this post.  Blurb doesn't even know I exist- our order was in Mr. Q's name :)

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3 comments:

  1. Ah good for you!! It looks great :)

    We got married in August and are STILL working on choosing our photos.... I just can't wait at this point to get my album.

    Stephanie
    http://sharelovealways.blogspot.ca/

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    Replies
    1. Thanks Stephanie! Maybe we'll eventually get around to hanging some photos on the wall :)

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  2. I made album through snapfish for our parents and my grandmother this past Christmas. And for us, well our package included an album, but I still haven't contact our photographer with what photos to include. Hopefully by the time I do, she still remember who we are!

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