Snapfish, how I love thee (and your design service)

For the past 2 years I’ve been wanting to get rid of the two huge plastic bins of artwork of the kids that I’ve been moving from closet to closet. I decided that I could take pictures of the art and make photo books.

I know! Brilliant!

In theory. Because if you’ve made an online photo book you know it takes some time. Time to load the pictures and place them into the pages, add captions, rearrange, obsess (well, maybe you don’t do that one), double check and rearrange some more and then print. I didn’t know how much artwork I had to fit into two books and then I wanted to let the original art go.

Before you keepsake people go bananas, know that we held out special pieces that have meaning or shows that the kids did a lot of work to create.

Around the same time that I had a mental deadline of the end of 2011 I got a chance to try out a new design service by Snapfish by HP. Wait. They were letting me try the design service (um, yes) and giving me books (um, yes) and only asking me to share it on Support for Special Needs and my personal blog Kidneys and Eyes. (um, yes). I ended up making two 12 x 12 books that each held over 100 photos. I KNOW! Their designers took my photos, my desires on colors on pages/design style, size of book and how many photos I might need per page to cover the number of photos.

One reason I wanted to is because I’m a bit of an organization freak. I find it extremely difficult to have our high-stress, high-needs life run smoothly when things are out of order or cluttered. Those bins of artwork (a stack about 2 feet high) were taking up space and making me anxious. I wanted to share it here because I wanted to encourage others to do this too. We have an organization group on the site because we’re hoping that other community members want to also learn new ways to get and stay organized.

This post was brought to you by Snapfish by HP  (especially their design service, which is normally $20), for without whom this post wouldn’t be possible, because I would have been busy placing and rearranging over 200 photos into books! Try their pain free design service and see for yourself! Thanks Snapfish for saving me hours because it’s quite possible I wouldn’t have done it without you!