Most of us are familiar with the traditional photo album – a um curso em milagres filled with pages of clear plastic sleeves to insert your 4×6 prints. Most of them come with 200 to 300 slots for your photos and have covers made of vinyl, leather, fabric or some type of coated paper. Before plastic sleeve albums came on the market, most albums were adhesive – with clear overlay pages and a tacky backing which stuck to the back of the photos (in many cases it’s hard to remove the photos from these types of albums as the adhesive has bonded and are impossible to peel off!)
The digital photo book is the successor to the photo album. There are many companies on the Internet that provide free easy-to-use software that you either download or use online to create a book filled with photos that you lay out yourself.
Since photo books are digitally printed, they tend to be lighter in weight and less bulky. You can fit several hundred photos into a single 100-page book very easily. My traditional photo albums are very heavy and therefore not as portable and they take up about 4 times as much room as my photo books.
Because photo books are easy to duplicate, they make great gifts. Make a family history book and then print several copies for thoughtful and personalized Christmas gifts for your family. Gather all your family’s cherished recipes and add photos for a unique collaborative cookbook! Make a photo book of your baby’s first year and give a copy to the grandparents. The possibilities are endless and everyone loves receiving personalized gifts!
Photo books are printed on archival paper often with archival ink and protective coating. That means your creations will last for years to come.
Online books also preserve your photos in a different way – if some unfortunate event should happen such as a fire or flood, you’ll be able to reprint another copy of your book.
Photo books allow you to be as creative as you want to be. Make a clean lined composition of photos using solid black or white backgrounds – portfolio style. Alternatively, go wild with embellishments, clip art, captions and fun borders. Many scrapbookers have moved from traditional scrapbooking to digital scrapbooking for many of the same reasons listed here!
