Fresh off the holiday’s, most everyone has a new batch of digital photos documenting their family holiday events, so this week I tried to come up with some useful ideas on what do to do with these images.
Shutteryfly, one of my favorite online digital picture services has recently upgraded its photo book line with the new Storyboard Tool. Even without the tool, designing a hard cover, coffee table style photo book with your own photos is a breeze, and now the new tool adds more features and makes it even easier.
After you create your free account and load your photos to the site, (this is the most time consuming process of the book as the time this takes depends on your internet connection speed along with how many photos you want to add and what size they are) the Storyboard Tool allows users to easily organize and add the photos to the book.
Users can choose to have the photos automatically added to the pages or manually select the photos you want for each page in the order you want your story told. The Storyboard Tool then selects the appropriate layouts. When a layout is selected and an extra photo is needed, you get a message telling you just that.
Addition photos or changes are made in a simple drag and drop manner. If you want to only have the photos you selected on the page, you can override the request for the extra photo simply by selecting a layout with your desired amount of photos. Each layout also contains areas for putting in short captions to describe each photo or just give a location.
I’ve done several of these books in the past, but each time I did it manually, selecting my photos to go on each pages with the layouts I wanted. But this time I did use the new Storyboard Tool and I was amazed at how well it laid out the book along with how fast it was.
Even after the photos were laid out in the book, I was able to adjust the order, change the backgrounds for each page and even swap out a few images.
The books come in all different sizes and styles, so check the web site for exact pricing depending on the size and number of the pages along with the style of cover (photo, padded photo or leather).
www.shutterfly.com/photobooks.
Every family has a relative who pulls out a shoebox of photos to flip threw, where many of them can be from decades ago. In today’s digital era, storage and archiving photos is something people just don’t give enough attention to.
There are many choices ranging from storing photos on a server or hard drives, but the easiest way might just be to burn them onto Verbatim archival CDR/DVDR discs.
The discs are built with a noble metal in the recording layer resulting in the life of the discs to last more then 200 years, assuming they have been stored in a proper location.
They are produced in a unique manner with a highly reflective silver layer, which makes the disc look like a standard silver disc to DVD drives/burners. A hard coating is also on the recording surface to protect it’s contents from scratches, which can cause permanent damage.
A good idea might be to burn your digital images on a set of duplicate discs, storing one at your house and a second disc at a different location.
Each disc will hold 4.7GB of data, which translates to thousands of images for most. A 50-pack spindle sells for around $80.00.
www.verbatim.com
The HP Photosmart A636 Compact Photo Printer is one of the most portable printers (measuring about 5×10x5 inches) you can find to print 5×7, 4×6 and 4×12 panorama color photos in minutes.
Right out of the box, users just have to plug it in, follow an animated instruction guide on the display to install the ink cartridge, print a test pattern and then print away.
A 4.8-inch touch screen displays the controls and menus. The menu is very responsive to any touch but also users can edit photos also to adjust brightness, cropping or even using clip art images, which are stored in the printer to create greeting cards.
I typically use these printers in a true portable manner and don’t hook them up to a computer, but they are both Mac and Windows systems compatible. Users will find it simple to just plug their memory cards into the built in readers located on the front of the printer and then have the touch screen display the photos and choices for prints.
Trust me, all this is incredibly simple and produces outstanding results in minutes. The unit works off of tradition A/C but there is an optional battery, which can be purchased. HP website says the battery ($24.99) can print 75 4×6 photos on a full charge and weighs about 8oz.
On HP site, the printer sells for $149.99, an extra cartridge is $23.99 and will produce about 55 4×6-inch prints. A 100-sheet pack of 4×6 paper sells for $13.99.
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