Need a gift Idea? Create a Photo book with Picasa and Blurb
Are looking for a great last minute gift for Mom, Grandma, Uncle Ernie, or that cute co-worker from Accounting? Here’s an idea. Give them a book. Not just any book. But a photo book that you created from your best photos. Best of all, it’s only about 30 bucks, plus shipping.
The best thing about it, is you can go from nothing to finished and ordered tonight before you go to bed. All you need is Picasa and Booksmart from Blurb. If you don’t have Picasa, you should.
Step 1: Obtain and install Picasa and Booksmart
Ok, first, if you don’t already have Picasa. Download and install it. Let it find all the photos you have scattered around your computer.
Next, download and install Booksmart, from Blurb. Booksmart is also free. The only thing you’re gonna pay for is the printing and shipping of your books. I prefer Blurb over other photo book publishers like Kodak Photo Gallery and Snapfish for the following reasons:
Get Booksmart from Blurb
1. Blurb is cheaper, by a mile. Especially if you plan on having a lot of pages.
2. Blurb allows full bleed pages. This means your photos can go right to the edge of the page. This is a nice touch that few others offer.
3. Blurb’s books feature a custom paper dust jacket. I’m not sure anyone else does this. It’s a great touch, and really makes your book seem professional.
Ok. So go get Booksmart already, and install it.
Step 2: Select and Edit Photos
Now. Go to Picasa and choose all your best photos. In the photo library,
- select the photos (hold down CRTL to select more than one.)
- click “Add to” at the bottom of the Picasa window.
- Choose “New Album”
- Then give the album a name like “Photo Book for Mom”
Continue to add photos to your album until you’ve chosen all you want.
Now, select that Album in the right hand pane of Picasa to see all the photos you selected.
Make sure you correct the exposure on the photos in case they are too dark or too light.
For real artistry, why not make a few of the shots black and white.
Good work. You’re almost done.
With the album selected click “Edit” then “Select All”
With all the photos in the album selected choose “File” then “Export Picture to Folder” –
Make sure the option for “Use Original Size” is selected. You want to make sure Blurb gets the highest resolutions pictures possible.
This will take all your adjusted photos and make copies that we will insert into our book.
Depending on how many photos you have selected, this step could take a few minutes.
Step 3: Creating the book.
We’ve selected all the raw material for your book. Now lets assemble it. Open up Booksmart, which you should already have downloaded and installed.
When Booksmart opens, choose “Start A new Book” from the opening screen.
Choose “Photo Book” as the type of book to create.
On the next screen, choose the 8×10 book (it’s the only size they offer, right now)
On the next screen I prefer to choose “Mix It Up” for the number of images per page. Choose whatever you like.
Next, give your book a title, and Put your name in the Author field.
Next, you can choose the color theme for your book. I like the dark pages of “Darkroom,” but choose whatever you want.
Last, you tell blurb where to find the pictures to put in the book. You also indicate if you want Blurb to automatically create pages and fill the book for you (they call this autoflow) or you can hand craft each page on your own. For the first time, choose Autoflow.
Click the “Get Pictures” button, and find the Folder where you just exported all the pictures from Picasa. Open that folder and press CTRL+A to select all the photos.
Then click Open then Continue.
Booksmart will take a few minutes and bring in every photo from your Picasa Album, and automatically create your book for you.
It’s gonna create your dust Jacket, do all your page layouts. Heck, it’s gonna make your book for you.
You can always rearrange pages, change layouts, move pictures around the page, rotate them, zoom in and out and add captions to your photos. Go ahead. Get creative. Definitely review each page to make sure it looks just right.
As of today pricing is downright reasonable. Starting at $29,95 for books up to 40 pages, and only $79.95 for books up to four hundred pages. Shipping is added to these prices. But compared to others, that’s a great price.
Once you have the book done just the way you like it. Click “Publish” then “Order Book” And your book will be automatically transferred up to Blurb’s website, and you can order as many copies as you want.
If you want, they’ll even add it to their bookstore in case other relatives want to order a copy. Here is a book that I created as a gift. ()
In my experience books take about a week to create and ship, so if you act today you JUST might make it for the holidays.
Here are two photos of a complete book that I made
Book Cover
These books make great gifts. After I gave one to my Ma a couple years ago she said “These are the only gifts you ever need to give me, I love them!”
[tags]Mike DelGaudio, Picasa, Blurb, Booksmart, Gift Idea[/tags]
I have been using picassa as well for editing all my ohotos. I have also converted a bunch of my friends to do the same.
I am part of a small start up company, and after reading your post on Blurb, I thought you might like to know about beta iMemoryBook as well. It is an online memory book system. Unlike blurb there is nothing to download because it is all Web 2.0 (drag and drop). Plus it is completely collaborative. Your whole family can get together and create a book.
Take a look at it. http://imemorybook.com/memory-book
Happy Christmas,
Jeff Harmon
Team iMemoryBook
Cool! kabababrubarta
For anyone (such as myself) who would like to give a personalized gift but isn’t too good with software, I found a photo album that uses real photos and allows you to record a brief message for each photo. http://www.vat19.com/dvds/talking-photo-album-record-messages.cfm
Hey, thank you for all this great information! I am so happy that I found your site and I really appriciate all the great info.
happy thursday!
Glad to help, Linda!
I write poetry and would like to make a “photobook” where I can place one of my poems beside a photograph. Can you help?
@Susan
Hi Susan,
Whilst Blurb is predominately used by photographers, it is basically all purpose book publishing software, so you will certainly be able to create the poem and photo book you mention.
Enjoy!
If you navigate to the Blurb site and read their terms and conditions carefully, when you use their publishing service you give up forever the rights to your photographs. This holds for both Blurb and anyone Blurb decides to give them to! No thanks. I refuse to grant a royalty free license “in perpetuity” to anyone.
I have encountered a problem making a blurb photo album that the tech support has been unable to solve. For some reason, the “atrium” theme that I selected was applied to only the first 13 pages of my photo book (i.e. the photos on the first 13 pages had boarders around them but all subsequent pages did not have any boarders). Per blurb, I have 1)tried applying the theme to individual pages, and 2) trashed my “BookSmart folder and reloaded the program; neither of which worked. Any ideas on a solution?
Hello everyone, looking to post my sons images to share with family and friends but like to have it private / or password to access it. Is there anything like that out there? If so please forward info? Thanks a million!
Marc
Not True. Here is what Blurb says about ownership of what you send them to put into a photo book:
Yes. Absolutely. Blurb takes this very seriously and we really respect your content rights. (And by content we mean the original text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, works of authorship, and other material that you include in your books. That’s right: Sounds. We have to cover everything.) For the full legalese, please refer to Section 8 of our Terms and Conditions.
So what happens if someone sees your book in the Blurb Bookstore, and wants to make a major motion picture of it? First of all: Wow. Secondly: Go right ahead. All the original material you dreamed up and put in your Blurb book belongs to you once it’s published, as explained in Blurb’s Terms and Conditions. You can do whatever you want with all your own original material in your book – you can blog it, publish it elsewhere, make bobble-head dolls, spin off a sitcom, you name it.
Now you’ll probably notice on the copyright page of your published book that it says, “Portions of this book may be copyright Blurb.com,” but that’s only there to cover any of Blurb’s own original illustrations, content, and designs used in your book. This is your standard self-evident legalese, like “Caution: Coffee may be hot.”
Really, we expect you to take full credit for your own bookish brilliance, and reap all the rewards.
Hi,
I am frustrated! I have been working several months now scanning photos and pages of journals and other text in an attempt to create My Mother’s Memoirs. She died in 2007 at the age of 98. Some of the photos are close to 100 years old. I wanted to create a “sample” book to see how I am doing. Most of what I have done was put into collages (Picasa, of course). So far, every page I created got a “low resolution” warning and I do not understand the answer given to my by BLURB on how to correct this.
“That warning symbol means that the photo does not have enough resolution to print. Move the same photo to a smaller container until the warning disappears.
Please optimize your images for BookSmart according to these guidelines:
1) JPG or PNG file format. PNGs should be 8-bit and non-interlaced
2) RGB color (sRGB recommended, no CMYK) or Grayscale
3) 150dpi minimum-300dpi maximum. Out-of-camera JPGs are fine and don’t need to be resized unless you’re placing many high-resolution JPGs on a single page (for instance, into a yearbook-type layout).
Scanned images and/or PNGs should be smaller than 15MB. The width of vertically oriented scans or PNGs should be less than 4000 pixels; the height of horizontal scans or PNGs should also be less than 4000 pixels. Adding images that exceed those recommended limits may slow BookSmart’s performance, introduce compression artifacts into your images, stall uploading and/or prevent your book from being printed.”