Embracing a Healthy Family: photo gifts

Just in time for Christmas, I've noticed in between the mail and e-mail, I'm getting endless offers for free prints, photo books, photo gifts and enormous discounts off my orders. If you haven't created a photo gift yet, you are missing out as they are the best gifts to give anyone. I have created a variety of tear responsive gifts through the various businesses over the years.

Your options are endless and I'll include some of the ideas I have done:

Gather old photos of a loved one (i.e. father/mother) and create a story book. I created one for my father-in-law last year of his father who was a WW2 veteran. I included his Marine photos, statistics of the various islands he fought at, pictures of the various campaigns he was involved in, old war posters and so forth. I will state he had some of this mostly created so all I had to do was retype it into the Blurb photo software package, organize it and add to it. It induced numerous tears!
My mother-in-law has a family photo blog site (after loving mine, she got one). Without her knowledge, I was able to download a few of her pictures and one in particular of her and her sister with Santa was touching. I had that picture turned into a ceramic keepsake Christmas ornament through Kodak.
Through Zazzle, I created a personalized photo calendar for my oldest daughter. Each month had a picture of her sisters in it as well as pictures of all three. She loved it!
Another year, I made her photo cosmetic bags that still sit on her dresser as she refuses to use them as she though they were too pretty. I purchased those at Photoworks.
I alternate on the Christmas cards as two year's before, I used Kodak as I love the accordian style cards where you can have multiple photos in one card that spans out for a lovely display. Last year, I used Zazzle to create my cards, matching postage stamps and matching stickers. They were gorgeous! You can go here to see some of my Zazzle projects.
This year, I just purchased a personalized photo book from YourPictureBook.com. I was provided one to review and liked it so much that I had one created for my other daughter. They will have matching books personalized with their photos. Want to see the review, read here.
TrendyPrints.com is another soon-to-be Christmas shopping stop as I was able to review their scrapbook and loved how easy they were to create and they beautiful quality. Want to see the review, click here.

If interested in all the free and reduced codes to the various photo gift sites, leave me a comment with your e-mail (if you are not registered) and I'll send those out to you. I'm still gathering them myself as I want to start ordering and taking advantage of the free offers from places such as Kodak, Shutterfly, TrendyPrints and more!

MyPublisher has these great books you create from your photos. Once you install their software, which was just upgraded to include new fonts and other features, it's very easy to do.

MyPublisher has so many choices and features, it's amazing. You can login and return to projects, check order status, view projects and reorder.

It's an easy four step process:

Choose the photos you want to add to the book size and style.
After you click make book, you simply drag the photos to the slot you want them to appear.
You definitely have to click on preview to ensure they are appearing where you want them to appear and if you decided to add text, double check to ensure spelling is correct and the text is appearing with the correct photo. I almost made a mistake by not carefully reviewing the preview before purchasing.
Buy the book!

This was our Summer 2009 book that I will purchase for each of the kids as a Christmas gift. My new family tradition is to create a yearly special photo book to help with the collection of memories. My last book was a couple of year's ago based on our time in Hawaii so I'm a little behind!

These personalized gifts are great for parents and grandparents too.

The quality is amazing and the shipping is really quick. I would highly recommend them for anyone on your gift list. It's so versatile that you can customize it for any subject. Last year, I put together a book of the military career of my grandfather-in-law during his time in WW2. That gift was received with tears as my father-in-law was extremely touched by it.

Everything is a click or drag feature unless you add text. It's so easy to use and another great feature is they alert you if any of the photos are of low quality, if you have misspelled words or blank pages.

Didn't think it could get easier? Well, it can! If you want, they will even put the book together for you or they will walk you through screen by screen!

Check out all their products and choices.