Alright folks, buckle up because this is a LONG post. I have lot of ideas and opinions about digital photobooks, and I’m covering it all HERE in this one post. If you’re only here for certain parts of it, just skim through headings to find what you’re looking for!

Origins

I started old-school scrapbooking a long, LONG time ago. My mom and older sisters scrapbooked, so I wanted to be in on that, even though, as the youngest child, I was NOT old enough to scrapbook (read: my early pages were hideous and misspelled, and did I mention hideous??). I suppose you can’t be good at something right away though, so I’m grateful for that head start and many, many years of practice. I did improve over the years, and as a teenager I created many scrapbook layouts that were functional and beautiful.

I’m not sure exactly what propelled me to chronicle my life so well, but I have a finisher-type personality, so I like to start projects AND finish them — it’s always been a goal to scrapbook my whole life. There were many times in high school when I would print out 500 pictures at a time of various trips and events, and then I’d chip away at them over the next few months.

At some point after I got married, I decided that I wanted to move to digital scrapbooking. This was the BEST decision and I have never looked back or regretted it!

I already had a batch of photos printed, and I was in a paper scrapbooking group (with my mom and a bunch of older ladies!! 🤣) at the time, so I picked a starting YEAR for digital scrapbooking (I picked 2015), and then only worked on photos prior to that year to put into physical scrapbooks. Once I finished with the physical photos, it was time to embrace digital photobooks!

Getting Started with Digital

By late 2017 I still hadn’t gotten started with digital photobooks. I had been stewing in indecision about which digital photobook resource to try when one of my favorite bloggers to follow at the time posted about this exact topic! She shared all about her search for the best digital photobooks, which one she selected, and what it looked like. I was sold! I’ve been using Mixbook ever since.

As far as other brands are concerned, I really can’t tell you what’s most cost effective or best quality, because I’ve only tried Mixbook. I did make ONE Shutterfly book 10+ years ago, and I can tell you I like my Mixbooks a whole lot better than my Shutterfly book; of course, that could just be the specific settings I had selected, but basically Mixbook’s default settings are awesome.

I’m also not sure about price comparison, but MIxbooks do seem expensive. I NEVER buy a book without at least a 40% off coupon (the highest coupon I see anytime during the year is 55% off plus free shipping — happens for Black Friday and I think Mother’s Day), and even with a coupon, books are usually around $100 each. That being said, the books are beautiful and well-made. Plus, I find the website to be very user-friendly.

The first book I made was a “Baby’s first year” book, since my oldest, Ada, had recently had her first birthday. I rushed to make the book in about a week so that I could take advantage of Mixbook’s Black Friday sale, and when my book arrived, it was PERFECT! I truly think Mixbooks are such high quality — such beautiful books 🤩

Over the next year, I made six more digital books, and now, 4 years after that, I have a total of 15 mixbooks (soon to be 16, after I order my 2022 book! 😏) .

What Books I Make

I make 4 types of Mixbooks: 1. Baby’s first year, 2. Yearbooks, 3. My old books & 4. My kids’ childhood books

Baby’s First Year

Pretty self-explanatory, but I make a book of each of my kids’ first years.

I include baby announcement and gender announcement photos, monthly pregnancy photos, maternity photos, birth stories from my perspective and Russ’s, newborn photos, and then photos from their whole first year. I am diligent about taking a monthly photo of Baby for that first year, and those monthly photos become the cover of the book, as well as divider pages within the book. I include monthly milestones and stories, and I end the book with their first birthday party (and I always do a more extravagant party for the first birthday than I do for most birthdays thereafter).

I may or may not make a copy of their baby book when they’re ready to leave home so we can each have one (but I’m really not sure, since I do cover the same things in my family yearbooks).

Yearbooks

When I did paper scrapbooking, I scrapbooked by event — a layout for prom, a layout (or 20) for a family vacation, a layout for a fun party. But when I started having kids, I started taking a lot more pictures that did not fit into any particular “event” category, so I switched tactics. Now I make a book for each complete year, and I separate things by month. If there is a particular event that has many photos I want to include, I either include it alongside other things that happened that month with a special “title” around those pictures, or I use a different photo layout than what I normally use to set that event apart.

Here’s an example of including a title over top of my regular photo layout.

Here’s an example of a different photo layout I’ve started using to set vacations apart from the rest of the book (bigger photos, plus they go to the edges of the pages).

Old Books

Like I mentioned, I started digital scrapbooking with the year 2015, but my marriage began in 2012. After beginning with digital scrapbooking, I soon realized that I wanted matching photobooks for my whole marriage, so I went through all of my paper scrapbooks and put those into matching Mixbooks. Then, I threw all the originals in the trash! 😱 Some people are shocked by this, but I actually loved it. I love that I still had a record of all the work I put into those original scrapbooks, but now in a much more slim and manageable (and beautiful!) condition.

If you want to do something like this, what I found worked best was placing each scrapbook page flat on the ground near a window, and making sure the photo was square at each corner. Then I cropped the floor out of the photo, so that all that remained was the actual scrapbook page. I also scanned some of my pages with a regular scanner, but I personally preferred taking photos as it was easier, especially with pages that had a lot of 3-D items for embellishment. To put the photo in Mixbook, I simply added one large photo box and put the whole scrapbook page into that photo box. With a few pages, I added new journalling over top of the existing journalling so that it was easier to read (in cases when I chose a paper/marker combo that didn’t show up well).

Here’s an example of scanned scrapbook pages that I put into a Mixbook.

I’ve done the same thing with scrapbook pages I had from prior to my marriage, but so far I’ve only printed my high school and college years. Those were the years when I took complete ownership over my photos, so I know I have pretty much everything I want. For years from my earlier childhood, I need to do some digging into my parents’ photo collection before I can finalize them!

Childhood books

These books are perhaps the ones I’m most excited about! Just like the baby’s first year books, these books are for each of my kids. I’ve heard about people just making a copy of their family yearbooks for their kids, but who needs EIGHTEEN books to take with them when they leave home?! Just seems very excessive to me.

So instead, I’m making 1-2 books to cover my kids’ entire childhoods (1-2 because I’m not sure how many pages it will be as yet, so we’ll just see whether it makes sense to make one big book or two smaller ones). I do about 6-10 pages per year of life (so far), and I include things like halloween costumes, Christmas, birthday celebrations, and family vacations, as well as yearly update blurbs. I also include a bunch of my favorite photos of that kid from the year. I just think this is going to be the coolest book ever because it will thoroughly cover their childhoods without being completely overwhelming (like 18 books would be 😅). I think I’ll probably make two copies of these books when I finally print them (one for me, one for the kid), but who knows.

Here’s an example of how I document birthday celebrations in the childhood books

Things I Love about Digital Scrapbooking

Oh man, SO MANY THINGS. I will never not sing the praises of digital scrapbooking because I find it superior to paper scrapbooking in every way. Here are the things I love about it, in no particular order.

More Minimalistic than paper scrapbooking

Paper scrapbooking (at least the way I did it) requires printed pictures, many colors and designs of paper, ink, stamps, special markers and adhesives, Cricut machine and cartridges, and so many other things. I was fortunate when I was a paper scrapbooker that my mom had an extensive collection of allllllll the things and I had free access to it all; but I can’t even imagine trying to scrapbook now if I had to go to my mom’s house every time I wanted to do it. (Plus when she moved a year ago, I convinced her it was time for her to give up all her scrapbooking supplies so she can eventually go digital, too! 😏)

Simple & sleek design

I mentioned earlier that I converted some of my paper books to printed digital books, and holy cow. They take up SO MUCH LESS room and they look so much more uniform and beautiful. Plus, it’s way easier to pull out a digital book to look at than it is to pull out a paper book. The paper books were so heavy and bulky! (And I only used 8.5x11 pages for paper scrapbooking — not even 12x12!)

Portable

Not only do I NOT have to go to my mom’s house to scrapbook, but I can actually scrapbook anywhere with wifi. I’m all caught up on scrapbooking now, but before that point, I used to take my laptop to my parents’ house, my sister-in-law’s house, and my sister’s house to scrapbook with them (since they were stuck at their houses to scrapbook!). And although I don’t scrapbook at other people’s houses anymore, I can go to any room in my own house to scrapbook!

Easy to reproduce

For YEARS my answer to “what would you save in a fire” was always my scrapbooks and journals. Those things can’t be replaced! Unless they’re stored in the digital cloud of Mixbook and THEN THEY CAN 🤣 So now I can, you know, save my children 😉 Jokes aside, I love this peace of mind that my photos and all my work spent documenting can be easily reprinted if my books are ever destroyed in any way.

Journalling is Better

I used to practice every bit of paper journalling on a scrap paper before actually adding it to my scrapbook. I had to make sure I could fit whatever I wanted to write into the available space. Now, I just type it out and adjust it according to the space I have! Plus, it’s always legible, and it’s always in colors that are easy to read (which was not always true with my paper scrapbooking).

Less Waste

I already mentioned that with paper scrapbooking, the supplies are much more complicated and excessive. But that also means there’s more waste! Although I would cull through pictures before printing them, I never did a good enough job, and always ended up throwing many away. That means I spent more money than I needed to and created more waste than I needed to! Same goes for the supplies. While I didn’t purchase the supplies myself, my mom had SO. MANY. SUPPLIES. and just a few people could never use all that stuff. Paper had to be cut, small scraps had to be thrown away — all in all, more waste.

Streamlined and Quick

I’m sure paper scrapbooking *could* be less complicated than I made it, but I made it very complicated. Every layout was curated and beautiful, which meant time to come up with ideas and time to search out just the right papers within my mom’s collection. It also meant only a few pictures (3-4 MAX) on each page because I didn’t want to cover up my whole design! I almost always did a different layout for each event, so that meant that for something like a vacation, where we did 6 different activities, I had 6 different layouts and at least 12 different pages. For ONE VACATION. Talk about time-consuming and just excessive.

With digital scrapbooking, I take a much more minimalistic approach (more on that in a minute) that allows the process to go so much more quickly. I’ve been caught up on my family’s scrapbooks since 2018, and I simply spend an hour, MAYBE two, each month to stay caught up (and that includes the whole picture-culling and -editing processes as well). (For comparison, I used to spend 2+ hours PER LAYOUT when I paper scrapbooked. I was NOT a quick paper scrapbooker.)

My System for Digital Scrapbooking

Getting Started

Different processes work for different people, but I’ve found that doing my process monthly keeps the task manageable so that I stay up to date. So sometime in the first week of the month, I do this whole process for my photos from the previous month.

If you are just getting started and you have a lot of backlog to work through, I recommend starting with the current month or at least the current year, and work backwards from there. Set a small goal, like 10 minutes per night, or 20 minutes per week, and then use those small increments of time to start going through photos and getting them more organized. I like the Slidebox app because you can quickly swipe pictures to the garbage can or into folders. Once you have a month, a few months, or a year organized, get started on a Mixbook! Let your momentum carry you through :)

Processing photos

First, I go through videos on my phone. I do my video process (read more about that in this blog post), and then airdrop all videos to a folder on my computer. After I have them saved on my computer, I delete most of them from my phone immediately. I look through the ones I might want to grab a screenshot from, and take screenshots where desired. Then I delete the videos from my phone.

Next, I go through the photos on my phone. This is the part of my process where I use the Slidebox app. I try to delete duplicates throughout the month, but if I haven’t done that yet, I do it at this point. I always have live photos turned on, so sometimes I go into certain pictures and find a better spot in the live photo to use. In addition to deleting duplicates, I also delete random screenshots, things I took a quick photo of to send to someone, and any photos that I quickly realize aren’t really worth keeping.

Once I’ve narrowed things down, I move everything to the free Lightroom app on my phone. Many years ago, I got a few presets from my friend Megan, and I still use her “airy retro” preset. I apply it to all my photos, occasionally decreasing the intensity of the preset if necessary. Once I’ve done all the photos, I airdrop them to my computer.

For the next step, I’m positive there are easier ways to do it now, but I’ve been doing photos this particular way for more than a decade, so I’m pretty stuck in my ways 🤣 On my computer, I have a series of folders: Documents>Pictures>Year>Months>Specific events. So for each year, I have a year folder (“2022”); within the year folder, I have a folder for each month (“2022.1 January”); and within each month folder is where I place the photos I’ve just culled. If a big event happened that month, like a birthday or a special outing, I’ll make another folder appropriately named (“Ada’s birthday celebrations”). When we go on vacations, I generally do this whole process separately for the vacation since vacations have lots of pictures. The vacation folder (“Bear Lake”) will still be nested within the appropriate month folder.

(And speaking of vacations, I am basically annoying about getting all pictures and videos from other people on the vacation right away. When my family had an adult trip to Alaska this last August, I created a shared folder on the last night of the trip and had everyone share their stuff RIGHT THEN 🤣 Then my brother-in-law took this comical video while we all worked on photos)

Finally, I open up all the pictures and look through them on my computer. I can see them a lot bigger on my computer than on my phone, so this helps me make a few more necessary deletions.

Once the photos are on my computer, I delete them from my phone, except for a few that I keep in my favorites folder. My photos folder on my phone is almost always filled with only screenshots that I think I’ll get back to someday 🤣 Then every so often, I copy my photos from my computer over to an external hard drive.

(and I need to make it two hard drives, because in this last year, my hard drive BROKE and I literally lost everything. It was REALLY sad, but luckily I’ve already used all those photos anyway! Now the only problem is when my girls get married and don’t have any of their early childhood photos for a slideshow 😭🤣)

Adding Photos to Mixbook

After all the photo processing is done, it’s time to add them to Mixbook!

I simply open my project, click ‘add photos,’ ‘upload photos,’ and then select the photos from the folder on my computer. Once they’re all uploaded, I manually add each photo to a photo box in my project. I usually end up not using a few of the photos I upload. It’s mostly a matter of what I can fit comfortably.

After I’ve added all the photos I’m going to add, I delete any extras from the queue.

Adding Photos to Childhood Books

After I’ve done allllll of that for my family yearbook, I go into Ada’s book and click ‘add photos’ and then, instead of ‘upload photos,’ I click ‘add my photos.’ This allows me to add photos I’ve already uploaded. I then scroll through and select any favorite photos of Ada from the last month, and click ‘add to project’ when I’m done.

If there’s something I want a dedicated page for, like Halloween or a family vacation, I can do that as soon as the event is over. For all the remaining “favorite” photos, I just leave them in the queue until the next birthday. At that point, I look through all the favorite photos from the last year (that I’ve queued up each month) and delete any that I can do without. Then I put them all in at once! I generally have 2-4 pages like this. For everything else in the childhood books, I use fewer, bigger photos.

Here’s an example of how “favorite photo” pages look

vs. the other pages that are more dedicated to a single event, like a holiday or vacation.

Details of My Mixbooks

I like a really clean, consistent look, so my Mixbooks all use the same layout and fonts throughout, and I don’t use any embellishments (though there are embellishments available). There are many “themed” books available to get you started if that’s your thing, but I started with a completely blank book, and now I just duplicate my book (without duplicating photos) each year (and then make adjustments as I fill it in for the new year).

Here are the other details of my books:

12X12 white books for almost everything, 8.5x11 (vertical) black books for pre-wedding stuff. Personally, I’m happy I went with the 12x12 books for our family yearbooks, but I like my 8.5x11 books, too, so I’m sure other sizes have other benefits! I like that 12x12 books can fit more pictures, but 8.5x11 is probably slightly easier to handle. Just depends on what you want, really!
Hardcover, soft touch matte
Semigloss pages
16 square photos layout — sometimes I stretch photos to cover 2 or 4 boxes, and sometimes I make boxes more narrow if the photo is meant to be a vertical photo, or wider if it’s meant to be a horizontal photo.
Veneer Two font for the year (front and spine) and the months; Carolyna Pro Black font for any event titles (like "Christmas" or "Russ's Birthday"); Georgia font for captions (size 8) and paragraphs (size 10).

For vacations, I’ve started using News Gothic for the title font, and I use variations of layouts I got from a themed book called “full photo travel,” where there are fewer, bigger pictures per page, and they all go off the edges instead of having white borders.

I use brief captions on top of photos (font in black or white) when there’s something short that needs to be said, and longer paragraphs in an empty square space.
I use our Christmas card family photo for the cover of the books, and our Christmas family newsletter as the first page of the book (a written summary of the year). On the back, I use the same 16 square photo layout that I use in the rest of the book, and I choose 16 of the best photos from the year (a photo summary of the year).

All 10 photobook covers from our whole marriage!

One more random tidbit

I make the yearbooks for my family, but I make them, so everything is written from my perspective. When I was younger I used to write things like “Ashley went through the window to unlock the door for everyone,” (true story about a vacation house 🤣) but at some point I decided that sounds stupid 🤷🏼‍♀️ So now I write everything in the first person. (I also write our family newsletters from my point of view, so the newsletters fit into my books quite naturally!)

I’ve Learned a Few Things

I feel really lucky, because by the time I started digital scrapbooking, I had already been paper scrapbooking for well over a decade, and I had also taken a few digital design classes. Therefore, I got off to a really good start! However, I have learned a thing or two since I’ve been doing this for 5+ years now.

Adjust your photo sizes

I mentioned this above, but some photos are meant to be vertical, while others are meant to be horizontal. For my first few Mixbooks, I either left photos as squares, or I made photos take up two whole photo boxes. Sometimes I still do that — if it’s a picture I love and want to highlight with the bigger size. But sometimes it’s not a particularly special picture, but I still want to include it, so now I just manually adjust the side of the photo box to make it more narrow or wide to fit the picture in question.

Each method looks good in different ways, so there’s not really a WRONG way to do it, but I just didn’t really realize I could adjust the photos in this other way until more recently.

Minimalism is the Answer

I am a minimalist in MANY ways, so it’s kind of surprising that it took me so long to figure out that principles of minimalism apply in scrapbooking, too! Here’s the thing — we can only give so much of our attention to something. If you take 20 pictures of your adorable child, and narrow it down to 6 different faces, those 6 faces will mostly get skimmed over as if they’re one. So I say — do it sometimes, if you REALLY want all 6 photos, but usually, pare it down to the very best one.

Additionally, we take soooo many photos these days, especially on vacation. But I’ve noticed that when I try to include every single good photo I took on a vacation, I actually get a little bored flipping through 12+ pages stuffed with 10-16 photos each. If you can instead pick some of your very favorites and make them larger, they make more of an impact. This is my first year taking this approach, and this is one reason I’m extra excited to see my printed book 🤩 So far, I’ve only committed to this drastic reduction of photos for vacations, but maybe someday I’ll do it for each month, as well.

For now, I try to limit each month to 2-4 pages, with the exception of months that include birthdays or major holidays. My book this year will end up around 55-60 pages, and I think that’s a good length. Most of my past years are 70-100 pages (and my girls can’t usually sit through an entire book 😅). My biggest book was 127 pages — it was one of my first books, and included the first year of my first baby’s life . . . I included EVERYTHING! We’re talking TEN pages documenting Ada’s first birthday party. Sure it was cute, but 10-pages cute? No way. Two would have been plenty. Okay, stepping off my soapbox now 🤣

Font Stuff

I covered the details of my font stuff in the System section, but I just want to reiterate — pick fonts you love and use them consistently. I started out this way, so all my books match just how I want them to 😅🎉 But there are still a few things I do a specific way now because I’ve tried it a few different ways over the last few years.

I used to clear out two photo spaces to make room for titles (when necessary). Now I just do titles over top of photos (other than monthly titles). I don’t think either way is right or wrong, but usually I prefer the title over top of the photos. This is especially true when it’s a smaller event that doesn’t take up a whole page.

I’ve tried 8pt font for captions/paragraphs and I’ve tried 10pt font for captions/paragraphs. The sweet spot (at least for the Georgia font) is 8pt for captions and 10pt for paragraphs. This allows me to say what I want to say in a size that is proportional to what is being said.

If you look closely, you can see the size difference between my paragraphs and captions (Holly crib climbing has a caption).

One More Thing

If you can’t tell, I have a VERY clear system and I’m really good at getting my photo books taken care of. If you are a beginner, my way almost certainly sounds overwhelming. If that is you right now, I highly recommend holding onto the mantra, “Done is better than perfect.” You don’t have to do things my way — if my way sounds overwhelming, figure out something that works better for YOU!

Maybe that means you just pick your very favorite photos from the year and put them all in a 20-page book. A few favorite photos will be enough!

Maybe that means you skip most of the photo culling process and just auto-fill your whole book, not worrying about duplicate pictures. While this may result in more photos than you really “need” to preserve, it will be better to have access to those photos in the physical world, than for them to get lost in the depths of your phone forever.

Do whatever works for you to preserve some of your family memories.

That’s a wrap!

Okay did I cover it all?! I feel like I just wrote a whole novel on my process, but if you have any questions at all, ask away! I LOVE talking digital scrapbooking (I mean, clearly 🤣).

(And if you can believe it, I also have a super detailed process for doing family home videos, which you can read all about here 🤣)