Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Cricket's "50 Years of Memories"

I caught Cricket Hackmann's post about "50 Years of Memories" on her Shaking the Family Tree blog.

What a beautiful thing to do for her parent's 50th wedding anniversary! Please go to Cricket's post and read the whole thing. She does an excellent job of describing the process they used to do this project in like 5 days. Amazing.

I have two thoughts about applying this to my own family photographs:

1) I need for my daughters to find this in time for our 50th anniversary (of course, it could be done sooner!). I have given them both a CDROM with our family photos (at least the ones I've digitized so far) on it for safekeeping.

2) This might be a way to pass family photographs to cousins for remembrance sake. I'm thinking that my father and all his siblings have died, and there are at least 40 cousins out there. I have at least a partial photo collection of 3 of the 6 siblings!

Cricket didn't provide a link for this company, but it's easy to find - http://www.mypublisher.com/products.php. The prices seem very reasonable for something like this:

Classic hardcover in leather, 11.25" x 8.75"
cover plus 20 pages - $39.95
printed book jacket - $4.95
each additional page $0.99
up to 100 pages.

That seems very reasonable for a single book for a very special occasion. To hand out to cousins who may never open it, at about $50 a pop it is pretty pricey!

There are other cover options - deluxe hardcover (15" x 11.75") and paperback pocketbook (7.75" x 5.75").

If this interests you, go visit the site for more details.

Thanks to Cricket for sharing this with the genealogy world!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

If I were to do this, I would probably use Lulu.com. It might take a little more work on my part -- but if one has the skill to insert photos/text into a word document to be uploaded to the site, the cost per book is much more reasonable. With a $17 base price, and 15cents a color page, you could have a 100 page book for $32 with a photo on every page.

I'd create a 'hardback book'. They do offer a photo-book, but it appears you can only upload images - 1 per page. With a normal hardback book you can design the pages as you want. Designing it would take a lot of extra work, but it could be worth it.

Unknown said...

Randy -- thanks for the kind words!

There are MANY companies that let you create your own photobooks: Kodak, Shutterfly, Lulu, My Publisher, Photoworks, even Walgreens and Wal-Mart. Anyone contemplating a similar project should research their options to see which software is the right fit for them.

We were really pleased with the quality of the finished product. Most importantly, it's nice to see the pleasure it brought our parents! --Cricket

Unknown said...

I did this for my mother last Christmas and it was a HUGE hit, both with her and with other family members who asked for copies after seeing it.

I used Blurb.com which looks a bit cheaper than My Publisher and is probably about the same ease of use. I was happy with the quality and service (placed the order about December 12 and it was delivered before Christmas).

I agree with John that Lulu.com is a good option, especially if you want to share the book with a limited list of people or if you have a lot of specially formatted text as in descendant reports. However, doing a book this way is much harder than Blurb or MyPublisher.