Daddy Troy: Welcome back to Gear Daddy, I’m you host Daddy Troy. This entire week is brought you by Boon, innovation from modern parents, and we are giving away a Boon High Chair this week, so stick around to the end of the episode and I will tell you how to win one. Now speaking of innovations today we are going to explore a new twist on a family photo album. I know as parents we take a lot of pictures that end up sitting on our hard drive, we might look at them we might not. Well today, the new family photo album is one you can get professionally printed on a hard bound book, its affordable, its high quality, makes a great gift, great keepsake. Today I’m going to show you how to make one.
Every year I take all the family pictures from the year, gather the family around the computer and we pick the best stuff. And we make one of these professionally printed, hard bound, family photo albums. We make one for both sets of grandparents and for ourselves, put one on the coffee table. Not only does my family look through it repeatedly but our guests and visitors to the house they look through it as well. And without fail everyone remarks how amazing the quality is of this particular book. It has its own jacket; you can do neat things like on the inside, print some text about your family history of the story of the year. You can put a picture of your kid on the jacket inside, you can put three pictures on a page, you can put one picture on a page, you can put the little boarder around the pictures, text as well on all the pages, and you can also do in the industry what is called a full bleed. You have a picture go all the way to the edge of the pages, gives it a little professional feel. Now to make one of these books you use a program called iPhoto. You have heard of your iPod, and you use iTunes to get music onto your iPod. Well iPhoto is a photo import program, makes it really easy to simply drag and drop to make one of these photo books. Here’s how you do it.
IPhoto is really easy to use to make a book. I have uploaded all my pictures to the computer; put them into a folder called Your Birth Book. I’m going to make a birth book today. And I simply click one button, make a book. I click on that button and it ask me what kind of book. I’m making a picture book, as opposed to a calendar, and up comes the book. First thing I’m going to do is chose my cover, pull in a picture of this young baby the day it was born. And now I will go to the interior of the book. You can write some things on the book jacket. You can write some introductory text. And then it’s merely drag and drop. Check this out I have a page where I have two pictures or three pictures. I go to the top; I pick a picture I like. Let’s do a little bitty feet series, drop in a picture of my kid’s foot and a burrito. And you can see it is really, really straight forward.
Now once you have dropped the pictures in you can click on the picture and you can make it smaller or bigger. You can move it around to reframe it. It really can’t get any easier than this. Actually it can because they have an auto fill button if you are kind of doubting your technical abilities or your artistic sensibility then you can simply click auto fill and it fills out the whole book. Last step go to the bottom right of the screen and you click on Buy Book. Pull out your credit card, then in a week you have this great keepsake on your door step.
IPhoto gives you other options. You can also print maybe a soft bound book and save a little bit of money. You can print a calendar and this is not just your average printed calendar at the corner copy shop. This one is actually really, really sturdy. You can print a cute little flip book maybe for the soccer team. I mean how cute is that to put to every player in it? It’s a great end of the year gift to the whole team. Now if you don’t use iPhoto there are other options, online options that you can use and I have links to those at episode 288 on DadLabs.com. This whole week has been sponsored by Boon at Dad Labs and if you go to episode 288 and leave a comment you are registered to win the Boon Flair highchair. But make sure you leave us your email address because we have to contact you if you win. We will see you next week on Gear Daddy where we are talking about birth videos. And we will see you all week long on DadLabs.com, 4 new episodes every week.