Digital Scrapbooks

When my first three children were born, it was not yet the era of digital photos.  So I took pictures with a 35mm camera and made their baby scrapbooks using a combination of Creative Memories and Stampin' Up supplies and ideas.

With the advent of my fourth child, I began using a digital camera and bought a digital scrapbooking program from Stampin' Up.  Nine, yes NINE, years later, I finally finished his baby book (as well as the baby books of his two younger siblings).  I was all ready to bite the bullet and use their print services to have them printed, knowing it was going to cost a lot.

To my dismay, I found out that Stampin' Up has discontinued their support for the program FOUR YEARS ago and no longer offered the print services!

I did some checking around into various sites that do photobooks and found this website that reviewed quite a few of them : https://www.toptenreviews.com/services/multimedia/best-photo-books/

I tried Shutterfly, as that seemed to be the best compromise between quality and price.  But I could not get more than a few photos to upload.  (You're supposed to be able to upload lots at a time.)  I kept getting repeated unspecified errors and the suggestion to check my internet connection and try again.  After two days of trying, I gave up on them.

Next, I tried MixBook.  I wasn't excited about their higher prices, but did like the fact that they had a higher limit (or no limit) to the number of pages allowed in an album.  And while I was uploading pictures and creating the albums, they started a deal for 50% all albums of the size I was wanting.

Since I had spent so much time creating my pages in my scrapbook program, I did NOT want to have to recreate them in a new program.  But I was able to export all my pages as individual jpgs and then upload those to the MixBook website.  (And the uploading process was a snap, unlike with Shutterfly.)  Then I was able to easily drag and drop the pages into the correct order, with each jpg filling the entire page. I chose economy shipping, which was quite reasonable.  They promised the order would arrive in about 2 weeks.  It arrived in just over 1 week.

And I simply could not be more pleased with the result!!  They are just exactly the way I wanted them.  Hardcover, sturdy paper, excellent and accurate printing quality!

I would definitely use them again.

Caveat: I did not use their tools for arranging photos, text, backgrounds, etc. so I cannot speak to the user friendliness of that.  But I am impressed with the quality.