One of the perfect present projects that I did for this past Christmas involved going through hundreds of digital photos on the many, many DVDs we have. I was collecting the best photos of Martin and Karin through the years to produce a photo book that would be printed and bound for the 2 grandmothers. The problem was that my kids are so darn cute it was nearly impossible to edit down the giant folder full of photos I ended up with.
And that wasn’t even counting baby photos, which I didn’t include at all. The photos ranged from about the time we moved into this house, so Karin was 4 and Martin was nearly 6, to our trip to Iceland last summer. I realized later that I was missing a lot of good photos from various sources but since we ended up with so many photos, it didn’t really matter.
I used a site called Önskefoto which I had gotten a rebate voucher for on Groupon. I got really annoyed with Groupon after awhile, since it seemed like the only things they ever promoted were teeth-bleachings and cosmetic surgery, so when this one came through in early fall, I was thrilled. (I did get another great deal via Groupon later as well: tickets for Anders to go see one of his favorite comedians, Robert Gustafsson, live in Malmö). The vouchers were for discounted prices on photo books and calendars so I decided to make one of each with photos of Martin & Karin for my mom and Anders’ mom.
The books ended up being 64 pages long, with 176 images, and cost much more than the original discounted price, but they were so worth it. I had so much trouble building the book on the site because our old computer was so slow and our Internet connection kept dying that I ended up going into work one Sunday evening to put the book together there. Martin was with me, and helped me to set up each page, and I swear if he hadn’t been helping me, I would STILL be there. It took forever! We were there for THREE hours.
I got the books and the calendars in the mail well before Christmas and was thrilled with the results. And then I realized how dumb I was that I hadn’t ordered a copy for us! But when I went back to the site to order another copy, I discovered, much to my dismay, that the site wouldn’t allow a re-order of a finished product. I would have had to re-create the entire thing and there was no way I was going to go through that again!
Both Märta and my mom were thrilled as well, when Christmas rolled around, and I figure if we want to look at the books, we’ll just have to visit the grandmothers! Luckily, we can ALSO view the book online, and I’ve been meaning to share it here for ages: