When it comes to Mothering Sunday, what better way to show your wife (the Mother of your children) how great she is than wading through 8 years or 40,000 photos of your kids and getting them to help you put together a lovely photo book of their early years?
That’s what we immediately decided to do when CEWE Photobook offered us the opportunity to review one of their photo books. They provided us with a £50 credit to create our book with, the rest was indeed up to us.
After a quick rummage through the back up of all our photos to make sure there was nothing untoward *cough cough*, I sat down with the kids to trawl through their baby to 4 year old pictures to make a nice book. I picked up to four as Ned is now 4 and it wrapped up a nice period in their lives. Kids are great until 4 and then go rapidly downhill from my experience*.
Once we’d picked a 100 or so photos, I downloaded them from the cloud back up to our PC and we installed the CEWE Photobook software to design our book. Since the software is locally installed, there is no lag or need to upload the photos individually as you design your book. The software is easy to use, has a lot of powerful editing options (I didn’t go beyond zooming or flipping images because our photography is frankly awesome but you can do way way more) and importantly, utilises a clever algorithm to grade the quality/suitability of your pictures for publication.
Basically a traffic light system lets you know whether the quality is good, okay or bad, which helped massively when it came to making sure we had pictures that would look as good in a book as they did on the screen.
It’s a testimony to how user friendly the software is that I was able to put it together with the “help” of three small children. We decided to go for an “Beano Annual” style of book- rather than a square or more traditional photo album shape. There are a lot of different options with regards to paper quality, we opted for premium glossy and I think the end result was good.
Once you’ve finished designing the book, adding a title to the front and the spine if you want to, you can then upload it at a click of a button. Upload times are obviously dependant on your internet connection; we’re on a 150Mbs Virgin cable connection, which gives us a 10Mbs upload speed. It didn’t take long. Delivery is 5-7 days from payment and postage is a little over £4.
The end result, as you can see, is lovely. It was a real surprise for wifey (and an early Mother’s Day present at that), and something that the kids felt they had invested their time in too.
You can order one yourself from CEWE website, and there is free delivery in March too!
*joke.