Weddingbee Blog

Mr. Mary Jane and I wanted to give our parents and grandparents something special to remember our wedding by. Aside from the obvious framed photo, I decided to make some photo books for them. There are a lot of options out there at various price-points. I chose Shutterfly for a few reasons:

1. I’m generally happy with stuff I get printed there.
2. I have ordered a Shutterfly photo book before, and was impressed by its quality.
3. We received a $20 coupon for Shutterfly when we started our registry at Target.

I started the process by narrowing down our wedding pictures. We were provided with over 500 shots, and I had already whittled it down to about 150 “good ones” (in which neither of us was making a strange face or generally being odd). I went through them again and found about 50 that I really thought were great and/or meaningful to include. I also threw in some shots I’d taken (e.g. one of our rings, some from the picnic), and some that my dad and FMIL Mary Jane had taken during the cake-cutting at our house.

When I finally had the photos selected, I painstakingly edited each of these photos for blemishes, red-eye, and other distractions. Then I color-adjusted all of them so that there were two types of photos: color and black-and-white. I decided to omit sepia, vintage-toned and otherwise treated photos because I really wanted a crisp-looking album.

Then it was time to do the layout. I chose an 8″x8″ photo book. I would have preferred the 7″x9″ format, but I really wanted a hardcover book and Shutterfly does not offer that size in hardcover. I decided to go with basic black for the interior layout. I figured it would look very professional, timeless and clean. I organized the album to be somewhat chronological. There were some moments (like our ceremony) where I had multiple similar photos, but felt each told a different part of the story. For these, I selected multi-photo layouts and put the “best” of the series in a larger slot, with smaller ones flanking it. Shutterfly books come with 20 pages; each additional page is $1. I ended up adding 12 additional pages to ours for a total of 32 pages.

For the cover, I chose one of the “White Textures” for the front, back and spine. I added a few more photos on the back. These photos do not appear in the book: they’re not the best-of-the-best (in my opinion), but they’re still cute. Mr. Mary Jane wanted a brick-building photo on the front cover, so I inserted the best of those. The front-cover photo does appear in the book, but with a slightly different crop. It’s possible to wrap a whole book in one photo (if you’re proficient with photo-editing, have a large-enough resolution photo, and are patient as hell with the layout-process). I didn’t have a good photo in mind for the whole book, so I chose a half-wrap layout option for the front cover.

Here is Shutterfly’s preview of our book…

… and here are some examples of the layouts I chose. (These screen shots and the one above are from Shutterfly.com, and all photos [aside from those on the picnic ’spread’] are credited to Shawna Noel Photography.).

I ordered seven of these books: one for each of our sets of grandparents and parents, and one for us.

Here’s the cost breakdown.

• 7 Photobooks @ $30 each: $210
• 12 extra pages, x7, @1 each = $84
• $13 shipping for 2 books, + $3.50 for each additional = $30.50

Subtotal (before tax): $324.50.

O.M.G.
I knew this project wouldn’t be cheap. But three-hundred bucks? For serious?

Lucky for me, there were some coupon codes. Free shipping for orders over $30? Yep, I’d say this qualifies for that. Subtract $30.50 from that subtotal. Aaaand, 20% off photo books! $210 just became $168. It turns out the extra pages qualify too, so $84 was now $67! Sweet. And the final plus: that $20 coupon I mentioned at the beginning of this post. So instead of $325, my subtotal was actually:

$168 + $67 + $14.50 (tax) - $20 (coupon) = $229.50

Still a big number, but almost $100 savings over the full price!

With all of the discount codes included, it breaks down to about $33 per book, which is pretty inexpensive as far as thoughtful gifts go.

Have you ordered any wedding books as gifts? What was your experience?