FYI: this blog post is serving 2 purposes... 1) to share with you my wedding book, and 2) to kind of give a review of Snapfish's Premier Lay Flat photo books since there are ZERO online with pictures. {I know, I looked.} So, this might be a doozy...get ready!!
Last summer, one of my items on my Summer To-Do list was to make my our wedding photo album. For various reasons {#1 being I'm a slacker} it just didn't get done. Fast forward ten more months, and summer is fortunately here again! I've been out of work for about 6 weeks and finally I can say that our beaUTIFUL wedding pictures are displayed to my crazy OCD standards in a photo book that I made my very own self!!
I have previously used Snapfish to make our wedding guestbook. I used pictures of me & Alex from the very beginning {2002!!} to our most recent engagement pictures. Instead of having all our wedding guests sign a book with just their names, they got to sign our photo book and leave a note if they wished! It turned out wonderful and I still look at it from time to time. It makes my heart smile. It's a great little treasure of mine.
Wedding pictures were SUPER important to me. I had a great photographer, Kerri Crutchfield, and from the moment I saw her sneak peek on Facebook I just knew I was going to love my wedding pictures!
This is what I knew:
-I wanted a {nice} photo book
-I couldn't dare pick out "just" 100ish pictures for my book
-I am too particular and would be super annoying to someone if they were trying to make a book for me
-Therefore, I wanted to design the book myself
-I hands down prefer Snapfish's photobook-making software over any other company's
-I needed to make this happen for as cheap as I could... {do y'all know my husband?!?!}
So obviously the thing to do was make another Snapfish book. I knew I wanted a 12"x12" book. I wanted it bigger than my 8"x11" guestbook and thought 11"x14" would be a bit "much." Luckily for me, Snapfish just came out with their new Premier Lay-flat Photo Books, which apparently is different from making a custom book and upgrading to have the pages lay flat. This new book is described with the statement, "New seamless lay-flat binding, extra-thick premium pages, and a deluxe matte cover make these books perfect for celebrating weddings, vacations, and life's sweetest moments." Sounds good to me!! I just wanted thick pages and lay-flat binding in a 12"x12" book so this worked perfect for me!!
Anyways, I worked on my book when I felt like it and got it all nice & finished. I had a question because I was being super particular, wanting to make sure the cover would be perfect. I used Snapfish's "Chat with us Live" online customer service option {which I always use with companies...way more efficient than calling a toll-free number!} and after chatting with the representative, they gave me a coupon code for 50% off my book!! A previous rep had told me you can only get 20% off the Premier Lay Flat books, and typically 50% off coupons I see do exclude those. I was SUPER happy to see that the new coupon code worked and I saved **$82**!!
Don't tell Snapfish, but I would have paid the full price for the book, I love it that much. ;) I was happy with the 20% off coupon. So yeah, ecstatic about the 50% off!
Anyways, I ordered my book July 28 and received it in the mail on August 2nd... that is a FAST turn-around time! My tracking showed an expected delivery date of August 8th, so my package was 6 days early! Just another reason I love Snapfish.
So far, in looking at my book, there are only two tiny issues. One Snapfish can work on in the future, and one I am currently chatting online with a customer service rep about.** My one beef is that there's nothing to keep it in. I know that's not included in the price and they never said it did. I just wish I had something to kind of wrap it up in or keep it from wearing with time. Y'all know what I'm saying?! I might have to make something. {HAHA! Just kidding!}
And my other beef is that my book preview showed that I filled all the pages up, but when I received my book there is a blank two-sided page in the back (shown below). It doesn't look too bad, just looks like I didn't put anything on 2 pages. And I would have, had I had known the page was added. Just sayin'! {SEE THE UPDATE AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST REGARDING THIS ISSUE!}
Okay, so, now for the big reveal...
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| Happiness Within is right!! |
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| the front cover |
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| the back cover |
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| A piece of tissue paper/vellum/whatever it's called in the front |
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| Page 1 :) |
One thing I will say is that I knew I was gonna be pushing it with fitting all my pics on 100 pages. {I am not crazy. I promise.} I didn't want to smoosh all my beloved pictures onto a small amount of pages. I wanted the photos enlarged so you could see all the smiling faces, little details, and the beautiful backgrounds. Surprisingly, I actually ended up fitting almost all my wedding photos on 85ish pages, which saved me a little bit of money!
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| nice & thick :) |
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| trying to get a good pic of the thickness of the pages |
And here's just a couple snapshots of some of my favorite pages...
{excuse the blurriness of my photography!}
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| the details |
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| the dress |
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| "what might have been" / our "Plan A" ... thanks, rain! |
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Pawpaw got a full-page spread!! ♥
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| me and my beautiful bridesmaids |
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| love the pops of yellow all throughout the book! |
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| special moment with my Dad |
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| the kiss |
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| Will cherish these pictures of my Pawpaw crying happy tears forever ♥ |
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| "and they lived happily ever after..." ♥ |
As you can tell, I ended up not going with any single picture full-page spreads. That's probably the purpose of the lay-flat books, but I did not necessarily have any picture I wished to enlarge to 1 ft by 2 ft. Haha! I did do several pages with just one picture, and that was big enough for me and my book. I personally just wanted the lay-flat pages to keep it clean and professional looking, as well as to be able to see all of any page that had pictures right up to the edge.
**UPDATE: I chatted with "Yeshwanth" online, telling him/her about my issue. At first, they said it was "just the cover" or something like that. I was politely adamant that no, this was an error. I did not ask for anything specific, just wanted to make them aware of the issue and see if there was anything I could do about it. Yeshwanth had me upload pictures of my issue with the book {shown above} to confirm it. After confirmation, the conversation went a little something exactly like this...
Yeshwanth: Nicole , I have just now checked the snap shots and i see that the extra page has been added to the book . Please accept our sincere apologies for the extra page.Yeshwanth: Shall i resubmit the order for you for free of cost?nicole mullen: Would I need to send the 1st book back
nicole mullen: ?
Yeshwanth: No need of sending the book back to us.nicole mullen: Oh my gosh, well then Yes, that would be marvelous!
Yeshwanth: Please give me a moment.Yeshwanth: Just now I have re submitted your order with 2 day shipping to the above address at free of cost.. You will receive a confirmation e-mail from us within few minutes.nicole mullen: I appreciate it so much
Yeshwanth: It was a pleasure assisting you. Is there anything else I can help with today?
Now how is THAT for customer service??? 100% customer satisfaction is what I am talking about!! That right there is what keeps customers coming BACK. Can I get an Amen?!
So, as you can see, the photo books are definitely worth their price, especially to commemorate such a special occasion. I think the cost right now is $79.99 for the Premier Lay Flat photo books. However, that's just for their standard 20 pages! I think it's $2.79ish for a set of two extra pages {so 4 pages including front & back} after that. My book ended up being like $164 in the end, but remember, there's usually a 50% off coupon you can find/use! {Try retailmenot.com or chat online with a customer service rep ahead of time to get a code!}
Hopefully this post will give future photo book makers a better idea of what they're doing and investing in. If you have any questions, leave a comment! :)
At the end of the day, I just loved the thing & wanted to share my great experience doing this! Now, onto the next thing on my summer to-do... only 2 weeks left of summer! {OMG!}
♥,
Nicole
Oh, and in no way did Snapfish ask me to do this or pay me to say these things. But I'd so advertise their stuff {obviously} ;)
