Our Family Yearbook Tradition: The 2012 Photobook

Before we officially close the chapter on last year, we love revisiting one of our favorite annual rituals: putting together a family yearbook. This January we added the 2012 Petersik Family Yearbook to our growing shelf, and it’s a small tradition that means a lot to us.

We order a photobook every January to capture the previous year’s best moments. After trying different services, we’ve stayed with MyPublisher since our first book in 2010 because the books match well on a shelf and the quality has consistently been excellent. With this third yearbook complete, our little collection is starting to feel like a proper archive.

I’m strategic about when I place the order. I use the maximum page count available (100 pages) because we like to include lots of photos, but most services charge per page after a base number. MyPublisher runs promotions fairly often, so I wait for a “free extra pages” deal before finalizing the purchase. For this yearbook that saved us about $80, which is why timing the sale matters if you want the most pages for the best price.

We open each book with a highlights page that sums up the year in a few short bullets. For this book we captured trips, projects, birthdays, and other milestones—little reminders of how the year unfolded. Rather than list all of them, here are a few representative spreads from the book so you can see how the layout and photos tell the story.

Some of the key moments we highlighted included finishing our kitchen renovation, visiting Granny and redoing her bathroom, celebrating Sherry’s 30th birthday, Halloween costumes, and hosting Christmas dinner at our house. Those events felt like the pillars of the year and made for great photo pages.

One addition this year was a small Instagram section at the back of the book. Since 2012 was the year we really started using social-photo apps, including a few candid square-format snaps felt appropriate. The Instagram pages give a quick, casual snapshot of everyday life to complement the more formal spreads.

Making a yearbook like this is both sentimental and practical. The books are built with thicker pages and sturdy bindings, so they’re easy to stack or display. Three books already look neat on a shelf, and we imagine ten or more yearbooks will be much more compact and attractive than a decade’s worth of loose photo albums.

There are also cost advantages. A 100-page photobook can hold roughly 700 photos if you average seven photos per page. Traditional 4×6 prints often run about $0.15 each at bulk prices, which would make 700 prints around $105—plus the cost of several physical albums to store them. Choosing a custom photobook for a fraction of that combined total feels like a smart way to preserve memories without sacrificing organization or quality.

We still take tons of pictures, and the yearbook process gives us a deadline to sort and celebrate those moments. For now, we’ll enjoy flipping through this newest book and looking forward to next year’s edition. In the meantime: more photos, more memories, more pages to fill.