Shopgirl

After returning from my Disney World vacation, I was very excited to make a photo album with all of our great pictures. When I was on the Disney Photo Pass website ordering my photo pass CD, I had looked at the Disney PhotoPass albums you could create with your pictures. I really liked the backgrounds and borders, but after paying $125 for the PhotoPass CD, I didn’t want to spend another $80-100 designing a small photo book. My mom and sister went to Disney World with us, and I wanted to make a copy for each of them. If I spent $425 or more dollars on photos and photo albums from our vacation, I think my husband would kill me.

I had used Shutterfly before, and liked the quality of my albums, so I decided Shutterfly’s much less expensive albums would work just fine, and they offered a discount on additional copies. I started designing my album, and I just was “not that into it”. Don’t get me wrong, Shutterfly’s albums are nice. I loved the baby photo albums I had made on their site, but after seeing all the Disney borders and backgrounds on the PhotoPass website, nothing seemed to look good with my pictures. I wanted some Mickey Mouse backgrounds, and I wasn’t even finding solid color choices that fit the theme of my photos.

At this point I was seriously contemplating using the PhotoPass photo albums, and hoping my husband didn’t notice how much they cost. I decided to double check with a few other photography websites and see if I could find some generic backgrounds I liked. I checked all the sites I had heard of before: Snapfish, Kodak, and Walmart photos. Nothing on any of these sites jumped out at me. All of them had good prices, but it just didn’t have that “Disney” feel.

In a last ditch effort to avoid paying the high prices from PhotoPass, I did a web search and found a site that rated all the different photo sites. This site had a 5 star rating system the considered quality, prices, ease of use, options, ect. There was a 5 star site I had never heard of before called Picaboo. I decided I would go see what their backgrounds were like. I instantly found a theme I liked better then any of the other sites I had looked at, it still wasn’t Disney, but it seemed to “fit” my pictures better.

I started to make my picture book on Picaboo, and soon discovered they have a free Background Community with almost 15,000 user created backgrounds. I searched for Disney on the background community and quickly found 117 backgrounds including great pictures of the Tree of Life and Cinderella’s castle, as well as some standard Mickey Scrap book pages. A lot of the backgrounds I found were more impressive then the backgrounds on the PhotoPass website. There is also far more page layouts on Picaboo then PhotoPass. I was so excited that I found this site. I have so much design control for my photo book, and I think it is really turning out great.

To create your own photo book: you create a free account with Picaboo, download the free software, do all the editing you want, or let the software automatically fill a book with your pictures. When you are finished, you upload your book to the Picaboo site where you can share it digitally with friends and family for free, or order a copy of an album for yourself. The software has been very easy to use, and I am having a lot of fun playing with it.

The prices on Picaboo are great too. They have photo books beginning at $9.99 for a medium sized soft cover album, and from $29.99 for large hardcover albums. They have more editing options then any other photo website I have seen. I especially love that I can make my own backgrounds for any page I want. I found a great discount code that you can use to Buy 1 book, get 1 free through November 14th. Enter code NOVBG at checkout to receive the discount. I am hurrying and trying to finish my Disney album before the 31st and if time permits I am going to make a few more albums to give as Christmas gifts this year.

I will post an update later this week and show off my completed photo book. I just wanted to tell you about this great site while you still had time to make your own album and take advantage of the discount code. If you need to make a photo album, you just can’t beat the prices and all of the great options for the photo books on Picaboo. Check out Picaboo today, you can make an online album for free, or order great books for yourself and to give as gifts!

Check back soon to view my album and for a full product review.