Through the Years

My oldest son is a senior in high school which means that graduation is only a few months away.  As much as I hate to lose my baby I know that he grown into a kind, caring, loving young man and will have a great future ahead of him.  *sniff*

As part of the day we will, of course, have a celebratory party after the graduation ceremonies.  I’ve been planning invitees, location, invitation wording, food, and gifts since last summer.  During the party I also plan to have a video playing on a continuous loop that contains pictures of him growing up.  I knew this would take a while to go through the pictures, both digital and printed.  And it has.  That’s been one reason the blog has been neglected so much.  I’ve been spending a lot of time on this project.  The only drawback?  I haven’t actually started this video project. 

Created in Wordle

Oh, the video will happen but it’s taking a back seat to *this* project.  You see, once I started reviewing the pictures I knew I wanted more than just a video.  I wanted to make him a book.  With everything going digital in today’s world the ability to sit down and flip through pages and pages of old photos is lost on a generation.  He may not appreciate the photo book now at age 18 but when he gets to be my age he’ll certainly be glad mom took the time to do it. 

After seeing John and Sherry at Young House Love’s yearbooks and purchasing Christmas cards myself, I knew I wanted to go with MyPublisher.  I’ve had a small photo book made through Snapfish and it was fine but I didn’t like being limited to their layouts which didn’t always work for the pictures I wanted to include.  My Publisher allows me more freedom to resize and adjust their preset layouts as well as add text boxes.  My Publisher is more expensive than Snapfish or some of the other services but they seem to frequently run specials.  

Work in progress screenshot from My Publisher

As mentioned I have a mix of media.  Some pictures are digital but some are only prints, especially ones when he was a baby.  In order to work on the book all the pictures need to be digital which means a ton of scanning to get the prints digital.  I could use the scanner on my home printer but with the hundreds of pictures I’m trying to get scanned it would take me until he graduates college.  But I found my local Sam’s Club has a Rapid Scanner attached to their Kodak machine. 

Sorry no action shots - it was moving too fast for me to do by myself!

Just let me tell you I am in LOVE!  I can scan over 200 pictures in less than 15 minutes which includes time for the CD to write.  The cost of the CDs is well worth the trade off in the time it would take to do this at home.  The Rapid Scanner holds up to 20 prints of various sizes at one time.  It will even straighten the print if it goes through the scanner crooked.  Again, I am in LOVE!  This has been the best thing in moving the book project along to where it is today. 

Stay with me and I’ll explain more about how I organized the digital pictures to make it easier to put into the My Publisher program.  

Note:  I was not compensated in anyway to mention the products, services or businesses listed above.  I simply want to share things I have found that work and that I like.