Last week I mentioned how I'm on a conquest to organize all our photos and get them in photo albums. One of the things that has held me back from doing this before is the cropping. I send my pictures off to Costco, but then Costco crops them to 4x6, which usually means a little off the top and a little off the bottom. It's not their fault, but if I'm not careful then I get photos back where people's heads are chopped off.
To avoid this issue, in the past I have manually cropped all the photos that I wanted printed. I hate this. It's tedious. It's too many decisions for one little photo. I don't want decisions. I just want it done.
That's where My Publisher came to the rescue. I just take the photo, drop it into the photo box on the template, and voila! I instantly see how it's going to be printed. I can zoom in if I want to crop it closer, but if it looks fine--no heads chopped off, no missing feet or hands--then I call it good. My Publisher has saved my photo sanity, and I'm just as tickled as a kid in a candy shop. With real sugar in the candy, mind you. None of this hocus pocus sugar free stuff.
However, I wanted to clarify what I said last week about the books being $35. Turns out, as I learned when I went to buy the book, the first 20 pages are $30. Then every page after that is $1. Somehow I had overlooked this little fact. My Publisher even has a feature in the program that lets you know how much your book is going to cost, but I failed to use it.
So. When I took my gorgeous photo book to the "check-out," I was a little distraught to see that my 91-page book was going to ring up as $100. I'll confess now that I would have paid $100 because I'd spent all that time and energy and enthusiasm and prayer in that one book, there was no turning back. But I was seriously bummed that my plan of creating a book for every six months wasn't going to work.
However, the silver lining is that because I'm a Costco member and had downloaded My Publisher from the Costco photo site, then I got a discount. Their coupons may change at any given moment, but it appears to be that currently the deal is 45% off orders over $100. For orders under $100, the discount is 25%. This means that if I had a 90-page book (totaling $99) my total would have been somewhere in the ballpark of $80-ish dollars (there's shipping to take into account). My 91-page book (totaling $100) cost $62, with shipping.
Thought you should know since I had even verbally mentioned to a few of you how amazing it was that I was getting nearly 100 pages of photo album for $30. I lied. Or rather. I was mistaken, and now I am correcting my ways. The lessons learned: if it seems too good to be true, maybe it is. AND, it's worth it to be a Costco member. I'd say, even if you weren't interested in buying toilet paper and diapers in bulk, if you're planning on doing a bunch of photo albums, it's worth it to get the Costco membership. Plus, who can beat their $1.50 deal of a polish dog/hot dog with a soda? Brilliant.
If you're interested in looking at more family photos than you ever thought you wanted to see of my family, here's a low-res version of the album (it takes several seconds to load). I'm taking a break from putting together 'January-June 2007' because clearly this is a project that once I start, I can't keep away from.
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