The Non-Scrapbooker's Scrapbook (Photobooks)

I'll admit it; there's no shame. :) Scrapbooking is something I never have gotten into.  Well, that's not entirely true.  There was that sad attempt with crayola markers, stickers, and a Mary Englebreit scrapbook to document my college years... but that was both the beginning and the end of my scrapbooking attempts.

But over the last few years, I've discovered these easy photobook publishing websites (and no, I'm not going to mention them or do a plug for some certain company; I've used a couple or three companies and found them all to be just fine for our purposes).  In this digital age, where we take skads more pictures than our parents or grandparents ever did, it is ironic that we are often less likely to have actual physical prints of our photos.

(Do you find this to be true for you?  It was for us, until I started photobooking.)

To solve this problem, I've opted to start regularly documenting our family's life by printing photobooks.

Yesterday morning, I woke up to a 60% off coupon in my e-mail inbox from a photobook company I've used before...  but the catch was, the coupon had to be used by midnight (last night).  Since I haven't yet done a photobook for most of 2011, I went ahead and did the whole year's worth of our favorite pictures in one book.

Previously, I've done entire portions of our lives in one book (like our 4 years in Istanbul: 2007-2011, or our family trip to Cairo), but I like this method of doing one year in one book.  It gives me the opportunity to share more, without having to be so exclusive and choosy.  So my plan is to wait for the photobooks to go on sale each year (like they did yesterday), work like mad all day on a book (which I did throughout the entire day, yesterday), and make family yearbooks.

I find that we revisit our photobooks fairly often; I keep them on a handy reachable shelf so they are easily accessible, even to the children.  The kids will often pull one out and giggle about or remember experiences or funny moments we've shared as a family.  Course, we've had to teach them to be very careful with them, as (even on sale) they're not cheap to print.  But I really love this way of keeping up with family photos.


How do you deal with family photos in this digital age?  Are you a scrapbooker?  Do you have a routine of printing out favorite pictures?  Please share!