Make The Annual Family Photo Book, from the workbench

Last year is soooo, well, last year. But before we bid it a formal adieu, let us get into one of our go-to annual happenings:

Yup, we are right now experiencing a resurgence of 2012 enjoy thanks to the recent arrival of the 2012 Petersik Family Yearbook.

We enjoy ordering a photobook each January (which we share every year) to encapsulate the previous year’s go-to photos. We were big fans of the first one that we picked up back in 2010 from MyPublisher, so we have stuck with them each year since so that all of the books look similar (plus, we enjoy the quality). So with the addition of yearbook number three, we are at last starting to have a pleasant little collection going.

This year’s book was a bit late in coming because I am quite strategic about ordering from MyPublisher. I like to use up the maximum allowed number of pages (100). But since you pay per page (after the first 35) it typically costs over $100 per book. BUT, I get MyPublisher’s promotional emails every week (perhaps I signed up on their site, I do not remember) and I know that they regularly run a “FREE EXTRA PAGES” discount. So even though I put the finishing touches on our book in early January (I was quite eager this year), I camped out for weeks while I waited for them to run that particular promotion. And I am so glad I did. Boom, $80 saved.

Simply like we did with last year’s book, we opened with a “highlights” page to sort of summarize the year in a few bullet points.

But rather than simply re-type them for you folks, we thought we’d share some of the corresponding pages inside. So here goes nothing!

Some of the other bullets were:

• Finish kitchen renovation
• Visit Granny and redo her bathroom
• Sherry turns the big 3-0
• Jesse & Slinky dog costumes for Halloween
• Host Christmas dinner at our house

One new thing that we did this year was also to include a special Instagram section at the back. Since 2012 was the year that we got began addicted, it was only fitting that we dedicated a few pages at the end of our family yearbook to some of our go-to little candid snapshots.

Now the only bummer is that we have gotta wait another ten months or so ’til we get to make the next book in the series. Oh well. I guess in the meantime we will simply try to take plenty of photos. Somehow I do not think we will have an issue with that…

Oh and I think this shot truly demonstrates the value of these books as a way to document your life year by year.

Three photo albums would not be nearly as thin and easily storable or displayable (their pages are thicker and their bindings are large). But we imagine that even after a decade of yearbook-making we will be able to easily store (or display) ten or more of them in a pleasant little stack, as opposed to a decade’s worth of photo albums, which could easily take up an whole shelf.

And when it comes to cost, hello money in my pocket.

If you do the math, 100 pages of photos with an average of 7 photos per page = 700 photos. Which is a TON of photos for each year, but we are snap-glad like that. And it typically costs around 15 cents per picture on sites like Target or Shutterfly (that is their best “bulk” price), so for 700 prints it would be $105! But you’d still need to buy albums if you were doing it the old school way (at Target they are around $15 for each album, and they typically hold 200 photos, so to store 700 you’d need four albums! So to get a pleasant custom made book for $45.99 versus spending $165 for traditional prints & albums – well, we are down.

You can read our original post from 2010 with a little more about why we became photobook converts in the first place along what we put in that album. And if you’ve got another system – or an alternate photo storage trick – we’d enjoy to hear about it. Until then you can find us taking pictures. Plenty and plenty of pictures…