QOTW: photo books

QOTW Penguin

This week I need to pick your brains. Tasty brains…

Thanks to the Project #365 I ran last year (and am doing now), I have essentially created a photo diary of a year in my life and I really like that. They are all archived online – here, instagram, Flickr – and on the iPhone, but sometimes I just want to hold something real. So I am thinking of creating a photo book to celebrate the year. I’m just not sure exactly how I am going to do it!

Options (as I can think of them)

  1. Get it done by some online service and bound to look like a “proper book”
  2. Have the photos printed out and stick into a photo album
  3. Have the photos printed out and hand-bind them

Of the three, option 1 seems the most appealing to me. 2 just seems a bit tacky and not something you’re going to want to pick up and idly flick through. Also, photo albums rarely go big enough for 365 photos! Hand binding could be an idea, but I have no idea exactly to go about it. I could make the album, and stick the photos in, but you have the same issue as 2. Or I could actually stitch the pages and case it, but that would be single leaf as double-sided printing is just going to be a bitch, and I’d have to make sure the photos were printed with enough edging and… My brain hurts thinking about it.

Looking forward, I am also going to want to do a similar thing when I finish the current year (Jan – Dec 13) and I’m not sure if I will still have access to the binding studio by then.

Which is a long winded way of asking for your help picking an online service to print this photo book.

Requirements:

  • Must ship to the UK (d’uh!)
  • Must be able to make lowish res Instagram photos look good
  • Decent layout control
  • Ideally it will pull from Flickr, as it is easiest that way to collate the photos and identify what is and isn’t a #365 image, but I can live with that not being an option
  • Ideally, as well as the image itself, it will also pull the title and EXIF data from whatever service it gets the images from. Again, not an essential but certainly easiest. I am not looking forward to having to manually date and title 365 pictures!
  • Not too expensive! I am not a cheapskate, and I want this to look good, but I am not made of money!

Thoughts? Experiences? Horror/success stories to share?

Sunday Roast: candid camera

Sunday Roast

As one week is drawing to a close, and another is adventure is about to start, I am delighted to bring you a roast. Short and sweet, kind of like myself 😉

This week started off fairly hellish as PCOS kicked my arse for the first time since last August, but bizarrely I quite welcomed the whole baby-alien-chomping-out-my-innards thing. I can’t put it into coherent words, but I felt right for the first time in a way that I haven’t for the past seven months. Turns out, I’d rather have the stabbing pain for three days out of the 30 than a sort of blah fluff in my brain for the entirety.

Still, hormones and the female endocrine system are fucking WEIRD.

And now as I have totally over-shared, why not get on with what y’all came for – the sweet, sweet linkage?

I always wondered what WhiskeyCat got up to during the day. If we’d had this CatCam, all would have been revealed.

The site is called Information Is Beautiful. Need I say more? Infographic Heaven

The voice of Christina Perri is totally seducing me right now. A Thousand Years has caught me in a spell. And no, I’m not a TwiHard 😛

If you follow me on Twitter then you know I am in the middle of a Supernatural binge. I have just one thing to say – Jensen Ackles. Hot damn. Dean would be a bastard to live with long term, but seriously, you wouldn’t push him out of bed in the morning. What tipped me over the edge was this clip. That smile at the end? I’m a puddle of goo.

I blame the hormones. Yep. The hormones.

And to complete my post, go read Matt Logelin’s blog. It will have you in tears (guaranteed), but also smiling with joy.

Oh, and yesterday I got a kick-ass new hair cut and colour and I’m feeling rather foxy. Publishing Crush, you have been warned 😉