Photos liven up anything that you see on the internet. The problem is getting the photos to your site. I can often find a photo to use (although not for this post) using Wikimedia Commons or sxc.hu, or sometimes I have my own photos. Now you can use Creative Commons photos if you attribute the photo, and you can always use public domain photos, but you can’t steal their bandwidth. So you have to get it on your server. So I’ve always downloaded the picture, then manually uploaded it through cPanel. It can be a pain, especially because then you have to type in the location of the photo manually.

While working on The World Competes (which I’m really excited about), I noticed a little button on the top of my screen: Add media. All I have to do is click on a little button, and it will let me browse my hard drive for the photo I want, give it alt text (where I can easily put Creative Commons info), and save it on the server for me. Then it’s in my library to use later. Doh. It’s so much easier to do now.

So if you haven’t seen that little button up there, you can save yourself a lot of time by using it. Yay!

It was really easy to make. They have a lot of predesigned templates where all you have to do is upload your photos and drop them into the book, choose your backgrounds, and add some captions. I did find that sometimes there wasn’t the right sized template for what I was trying to do, but they do allow you to upload full pages, so you can design your own scrapbook pages and upload them.

I got a little more creative with the second book that I won. I created some digital scrapbook pages using Photoshop, and uploaded them to Shutterfly as jpeg files to include in the book. To get it done a little faster, I also used some of the premade templates for some of the pages. I was able to create a 32 page book in only a couple of days. A regular scrapbook would have taken a long time to create.

An 8×8 book costs $30 for the first 20 pages, and $1 for every page afterward, which seems a little steep, but if you were going to make a regular scrapbook, it would probably cost $20 for the album, then you have to buy paper, embellishments, page protectors, and the photos themselves. So it probably evens out, or maybe is a little bit less expensive, depending on how much money you typically spend.

I did a little bit of digital scrapbooking about 5 years ago when I first heard of it, but I didn’t really get into it, because at the time, there really wasn’t a good way to publish what you had done. I don’t have a 12×12 printer, and I didn’t like the quality of photos printed at home either, so the layouts I made just sat in my computer. Now with sites like Shutterfly, I can create these scrapbook layouts and have them printed up in a nice book quite easily.

You get some free prints when you sign up, and you get 75 free prints if you share a photo book you create with 5 friends (15 per friend). I haven’t had a chance to see what their prints look like, but they have a really nice feature on their prints too. They print a caption on the back for you. The default is the file name and the date. I like having the date on there, but I don’t really need to see IMG_3521.jpg on the back of all my photos, so I replaced the file name portion of the caption with the names of the people in the pictures on it. You never know where your pictures will end up in the future, so I like being able to put the names on the back, in case my great-great grandchildren end up with them someday (lol, if Jesus takes a LONG time to come back), they’ll know who is in that picture of Laurana at the beach. Besides, sometimes it’s hard to remember the names of friends that move away if you don’t label your pictures.

You can create projects and save them for later. I started a school days album for Laurana’s school year that starts tomorrow. Just because she’s a homeschool student doesn’t mean she can’t have a school album, right?

I know that this site has been around for a while, but they have so many great products that I thought that I’d share how much I like it.