I did up a photobook of Darius from birth to 6 months for print by Photobook Singapore. It was uploaded on 26th of May near to Midnight and arrived today by DHL courier. So it takes about 5 working days to print and deliver.

I’m impressed with the Photobook’s packaging as it was delivered in a box, complete with bubble wrap and additional bubblewrap inside the envelope.

As I took out the book, the huge infant photo of Darius greeted me and I was like, “Oh, okay!” with a smile. Because the picture wasn’t really clear enough but still good. Darius was born with very red face and this picture was taken by Hubby the very first morning when he opened his eyes. The wordings were bigger than what I expected. I had Darius’ first day’s photo printed on the cover and his 6 months old photo printed on the back.

The first thing that I checked when I turned the pages was the colour of the printouts. It was exactly the same as what I saw on my computer after editing! Yeah!! I feel happy ^_^ because the first photobook I did with HP Snapfish turned out horrible. Poor paper quality and all wrong colours. That’s why I was really nervous about this one. The paper quality is also good though thin. You can add extra $ for thicker gsm paper.

The photobook size I chose was, 27.94 x 21.59cm or 11″ x 8.5 Medium Landscape ImageWrap Hardcover book.

This is how big the photobook is, his big head photo is almost the size of my palm. The quality is a little pixelated but it’s just a normal Canon 8.0mega pixel camera, not a DSLR so I can’t complain.

It's big!

These are some pages of the photobook. The total number of pages are 48, additional 8 pages from the basic of 40 pages (they only increase pages in 4).

I started with his photos from birth to 6 months. Then, birth to 1 month, 1 month, 2 months so forth. At the beginning of each month’s photo pages, we put in summarised text of what he was like & what he could do, which was written before in his monthly development posts on this blog. We are so glad for this blog as we wouldn’t have remembered so many details about him and took so many photos of him.

I ended every monthly pages with photos of us with Darius. I included his checkups at the doctor and some first milestones. Photobook is very flexible in the number of photos that can be placed on a page (as many as you can) and where to place it. You can have your our own choice of background, using photos as backgrounds, add borders to photos and adding text where you would like.

Though Photobook’s software provided us with nice papers, I still found papers from digital scrapbooking sites prettier and downloaded them for free (like Shabby Princess, Free Digital Scrapbooking). I could also use nice photoborders from the scrapbooking kits but I was really tired already with the numerous editing and placements, so I just made do with what Photobook provided.

The last page was information of his growth and height from birth to 6 months and photos with his relatives.

If you are thinking of making a photobook too, do hurry because there’s a 20% promotion going on due to Father’s Day ending on 15th June and free shipping (look here). I got a good bargain cos I was already making the photobook halfway when they came out with this promotion. For an originally $123.40 priced book, I paid $98.56 only. If you do not know how to place the photos, they have quick path wizard to help you place photos automatically too.

I had 273 photos in this 48-page book which when normally printed at 30 cents each will amount to $81.90 with no layout, no text and easily forgotten when glanced through in an album.

My purpose of this photobook is to show our guests during his first birthday celebration. It would be so much more memorable to look at his growth than just cutting the cake, isn’t it?

With this printing tested, I have plans to make An Outing Book with him going for all his first trips to places and a 7 months – 12 months book (after his first birthday). Will need more energy and creative juices!

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