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Today is the first day I have ever shared my personal wedding pictures here on the blog… and it’s all because of Shutterfly . When they asked me if I wanted to design one of their premium wedding photo books and share my experience with you – I was super excited, but I didn’t know what images or event I would make my book about. I started clicking around their website, checking out their unique design options and easy-to-use tools when I found their “ storytelling styles ” page. It is there I discovered a collection of 200+ gorgeous, custom themes that include backgrounds, page ideas and fun design elements that allow you to create a stunning and unique book, rivaling professional wedding albums; which is the perfect option for the DIY bride. When I saw the “Destination Wedding” theme, and all the adorable design options, I knew I had finally found a reason to print my wedding photos. I had such a wonderful experience designing this wedding album and I’m thrilled to be able to share it with you today!
Why I Never Printed My Wedding Photos:
If you’ve read my blog for any length of time, you know that I highly recommend hiring a professional wedding photographer – the reason being is my own personal experience. I was 23 when I got married, we were one of the first couples in our circle to say “I do”, our goal was to stick to our budget… and destination weddings aren’t cheap. Unfortunately, we ended up hiring a friend who was “good at taking pictures” – biggest mistake ever. We have a handful of great pictures and so many lost memories I could literally start crying. It’s not our friends fault, it’s not our fault; we just didn’t know any better. This was almost 9 years ago and there were no blogs sharing wedding tips or awesome online wedding vendor guides. Since our wedding we have only printed and framed one picture and I never created an album because I was just too sad. All of the images you are seeing here of my wedding, are the best we have… and honestly if it wasn’t for Shutterfly – they wouldn’t look this good!
How-To:
- Choose your photo book “storytelling style”. The theme and all of it’s goodies are then automatically added to your project as a template.
- You can upload your photos to Shutterfly from almost anywhere… iPhoto, your computer, Facebook, and even Instagram! Once they are uploaded you can add them to your project.
- Design your book! Use the page ideas and awesome embellishments to personalize your book – this was so much fun! You can add pictures one by one, or use the “autofill” option to have Shutterfly help you along the way. The page count is up to you!
Choosing your favorite “storytelling style” and uploading your photos is an absolute breeze and designing the book was super easy too. I did it over the course of about 5 days and worked on it a little here and a little there. I wanted to think about my layouts and the images I was going to use, I wanted to have the hubby look it over and make sure I didn’t forget anything. That’s not to say that you can’t complete yours in an hour or two, but I really enjoyed taking the time to make my book perfect and I looked forward to working on it each day.
My Favorite Pages:
Since my wedding imagery was lacking, I used every single design option and element that I could to make my book look its best. I added lots of text, I used the page ideas, I used stickers, and took full advantage of the photo filters. I even added photos that weren’t from our wedding but that were of our wedding items or other trips we had taken to Catalina Island, like this first amazing shot by my husband …
How I used the photo filters:
I love this page and I loved this night. The night before our wedding, we invited everyone that stayed on the island to play miniature golf and we rented out the entire place for 2 hours. These shots were taken with my tiny, old digital camera and looked very boring. I chose a large layout and used the “vibrant” filter on all the images to unify them and make them pop. You’ll see I did the same thing using the “sepia” filter for quite a few of the other images in the book including the one below. I love that shot of me in the bathroom right before our wedding, but the colors were terrible – applying the sepia filter made it all disappear.
I LOVED The stickers!
Being able to incorporate and truly customize all the “stickers” in the storytelling style was my favorite part. You can make them any size, add them anywhere, layer them and even use designs from other storytelling styles. It was like digital scrapbooking. The current fonts and on trend colors helped me bridge the gap between the nine year time span.
The Album
I keep calling it a wedding album because it is, but Shutterfly calls them “photo books” – let me tell you this is not your typical photo book. From crushed silk and leather covers, to their double-thick, layflat pages, they are professional quality for a fraction of the price. That being said with the options I chose, I will share that my 12″ x 12″ book with 43 pages was $240. However I was able to order while they had a promotion going on and saved 40% – which was an incredible deal.
DIY Album Cover
The crushed silk hard cover has a lovely piece of ribbon running down the front so I got a little crafty with it. I tied a piece of peach ribbon around it, added a bow and glued a shell on top. Peach was one of our wedding colors, now the album looks like us… and I know that you can do something similar!
Shoes here, Vows there, Love everywhere. I hope that I’ve inspired you, my lovely DIY brides, to get you thinking about what special event you could turn into a gorgeous photo book… from your engagement party to your honeymoon. I had so much fun with this one that I’m actually working on a smaller version for our honeymoon!
…that’s our cake topper. Our photographer didn’t take one picture of it, so I did and added to the book! I did the same thing with our invitations and my jewelry, since I didn’t have pictures of them either and now I love that I do. I truly had a wonderful time on this project… don’t hesitate to ask any questions about the process as I’d be happy to answer!
All images copyright of wordpress.com®. Compensation for this post was provided by Shutterfly. All opinions and experiences expressed are my own.
