Last year is officially behind us, but before we say goodbye, here’s one of our favorite yearly traditions:
We’re feeling nostalgic thanks to the arrival of the 2012 Petersik Family Yearbook.
Every January we create a photobook that captures our favorite moments from the prior year. We first ordered one from MyPublisher in 2010 and have stayed with them ever since so the books match on the shelf and because we like the quality. With this third yearbook added, our little collection is beginning to feel complete.
This year’s book arrived a bit later than usual because I wait for the right promotions at MyPublisher. I use the maximum allowed pages (100), and beyond the first 35 pages you pay per page, so the price can climb above $100. I get their promotional emails and know they often run a “FREE EXTRA PAGES” offer, so even though I finished the layout in early January, I held off ordering until that discount appeared. It saved me about $80, so the wait was worth it.
Like last year’s volume, we opened this book with a highlights page — a simple summary of big moments in bullet form.
Instead of retyping the highlights here, we decided to show you some of the corresponding spreads from inside the book.
Some of the other highlights included:
- Finishing our kitchen renovation
- Visiting Granny and redoing her bathroom
- Sherry’s 30th birthday
- Jesse and Slinky dog Halloween costumes
- Hosting Christmas dinner at our house
A new addition this year was an Instagram section near the back. Since 2012 was when we became hooked on the platform, we dedicated a few pages to candid snapshots pulled from our feed.
Now we wait about ten months until the next volume, so in the meantime we’ll keep taking photos — lots of them.
To us, these books are a great way to document life year by year. This photo illustrates how neatly the yearbooks stack up.
Three photo books are compact and easy to store. Their thicker pages and sturdy bindings make them more displayable than loose prints in multiple albums. Over a decade we expect to have a small, attractive stack of yearbooks rather than a shelf filled with individual albums.
There’s also a cost advantage. A 100-page book can hold roughly 700 photos (about seven per page). Printing 700 individual photos at a common bulk price of around $0.15 each would cost about $105, plus you’d need multiple physical albums to store them — often adding another $45 or more. So for us a custom yearbook — priced competitively — is both convenient and economical.
If you’re curious, our original 2010 post explains why we switched to photobooks and what we include in them. If you have another system for organizing photos, we’d love to hear about it. Until then, you’ll find us taking pictures. Lots and lots of pictures…