Photo-a-Day Book {Hogan}

Photo-a-Day Book | Hogan

Before Hogan was born, I had decided that I was going to do the Photo-a-Day challenge for him.  The PAD challenge is where you take a picture everyday for a whole year, 365 days.  It sounded simple enough to me.  I thought it would be so neat for him to have a book with a picture of himself from every day throughout his first year.  Here's the story:

Prep

Taking a picture of him everyday of that first year was a challenge itself.  Some days I was lucky to get a picture of the side of his face and other days, I was sneaking in his room at 11:30 that night to snap a picture of him.  Nevertheless, we made it and have 365 pictures of him for his book.

Had I started working on his book throughout the year, the task would not have been so daunting.  Instead of doing that, I waited until I snapped that last picture of him on his first birthday before I ever even began the project.  Lucky for me, I'm blessed to be a stay-at-home mom and I used every bit of his nap time for two weeks to get his book done.  So if you attempt to do this for your child, do yourself a favor and work on it weekly or monthly or even just quarterly, just don't wait and do it all at once like I did.

With the exception of a few professional pictures he had taken, I took every picture with my iPhone.  It was just more convenient for me to do it that way.  Throughout the year, I would save the pictures from my phone to our desktop computer and then delete them off of my phone to make room for more pictures.  At the end of the year, I think I had around 20,000 pictures on my computer.  That's why this was such a challenge for me.  I had to sift through all of the thousands of pictures I had taken and find my favorite one from each day.  Once I found it, I had to make sure the eyes weren't red or white and if they were, I had to deal with that issue.

To make it easy on myself when I actually started making the book, I created folders for each month of his first year.  As I found the pic I wanted to use for that day, I would drag it to the appropriate folder and then name it by using the day it was taken.  For example, I took all of his monthly pictures on the 11th of each month, so I would drag the monthly picture to the correct folder and then rename it 11.  I knew I was finished with each month when I had a picture named 1, 2, 3, etc.

Once all of the pictures were saved into their correct folder and renamed with the day it was taken, it was time to begin making the book.

MyPublisher

I knew I wanted his book to be professionally made.  I just thought it would hold up better that way.  After researching several different websites, like Blurb, Shutterfly, etc., I decided to go with MyPublisher for this project.  Not only did they send me a promotion for a really great deal, they also have the simplest operating system to use.  It was quick and easy to do and the results were even more amazing than I had hoped for!

MyPublisher offers several different options for your book.  You can design your own layout, determine how many pictures go on each page, add text, and all sorts of other options.

Hogan's Book

I chose to use one of Hogan's newborn pictures for the cover of his book.  This book is hardcover and you can choose to either have the image printed directly on the book or a jacket for the book.  I chose to have it printed onto the book because I worked in a library at one time and those jackets were just a pain!  When I received his book in the mail and opened the box, I could not believe how beautiful it was.  It is exactly like looking at a yearbook from your high school days.  The pages are thick and the color is exactly like it appears when you're making the book on the computer.  The overall quality is just incredible.

I didn't take a picture of every page, but I did take a few just to show you how the layout looks once it's actually printed.  I used the Oh Baby Boy layout.

This page is optional.  I added it because I thought with it being his first year book that it was appropriate.

On these two pages, I used a 5-picture layout on the left and a 4-picture layout on the right.

Another 5-picture layout page.

6-picture and 5-picture layout.

This 9-picture layout was probably the one I used the most.  I was trying to fit 365 pictures into one book and I didn't want it to be as thick as a phone book, so this worked best for me.

Pricing

My book ended up being a total of 57 pages.  I chose the 8x12 inch book.  I received an offer via email from MyPublisher for 58% off of my book purchase.  The total before my discount was $72.62 and what I actually paid was $30.00.  After tax {$2.55} and shipping {$10.99 via FedEx}, I paid $43.54 total!  I know that probably still seems like a lot, but versus every other website I checked, I would have paid at least $100 for the book and I doubt the quality would have been anything like what this one is.

Closing that Chapter

After I finished the book and actually got it in the mail, I realized that that chapter of my life is officially over, the chapter of Hogan's first year.  It is definitely bittersweet, but thankfully I will be starting another Photo-a-Day book in January.  And this time, I will NOT wait until he's a year old to start it!

Thanks for stopping by!

xoxo - Andee