Baby's 1st year iPhoto books

I love taking pictures. I always have. Now, that I have a baby, I take a lot of pictures. I was actually taking pictures daily until the baby was about 10 months old. Since then, I take pictures about every week. When it came time to putting together a baby book, it was a huge task. I only wanted to do the baby's first year book but I had 1603 good pictures flagged for that. It turns out that iPhoto books can only include 100 pages max so we were in a bit of trouble. It took me hours at night over days and weeks to put Tristan's first year photo book together. I ended up trimming it down to three books: Volume 1, 2, and 3. That's 300 pages and exactly 960 pictures inside. Phew!

When it came time to order them, I was a bit hesitant. I wanted to get two of each, one copy for us and one for my parents-in-law. Then I realized how much they would cost. Each book would cost over $100 so 6 books would be something like $650 with the taxes and shipping costs. I looked into other options such as shutterfly.com and artscow.com but they are expensive too and I trust the quality of iPhoto since we have ordered from them in the past. I just wished Apple would have more printing specials :( So since we were not in a hurry to get our copy, we decided to just order one of each. If we ordered them together we would only save around $18 worth of shipping but considering how much we were already paying, we weren't interested in the savings. By ordering just a copy of each, we were actually able to translate the books into French so that was nice. The three books, 11x8.5 inches hardcover came to a whopping $351.54. Yikes!

A week after ordering, the books all arrived today at the same time in separate packing. Apple really should get a cart system working so that we can include multiple print purchases in the same shipment. It would avoid the separate shipping costs too. Come on Apple!



The books are nice. I wouldn't have expected anything less. Some of the pictures look a bit dim but I suppose it's not fair to compare them to what I see on my bright iMac. I think my parents-in-law are going to love them! Now, that the first year book is done, I have to do the "after" first year books. Oh boy! Time to procrastinate again :)