Quality– yes. Beautiful options – yes. Several sizes and cover types – yes. Pricing – yes. Deals … Oh, yes!

Here’s the insider’s tip on where you can find our current promotions, when we generally change them and how we announce special promos.

Current Promos – We send out promo emails twice a month usually on the first and around the 15^th. Our current promo is also available in the header (until you X it out) once you’re logged in and always in the footer of your bookshelf. Finally, we always post them on Facebook and Twitter – feel free to share with your friends.

Special Promos – We have sporadic weekend specials which we promote via Facebook and Twitter only. If you haven’t t Liked us or started Following us, you should.  

Psst: our first weekend promo of 2012 will be the last weekend of January.

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September 25 starts my 90-day holiday giving “crunch time” countdown allowing me time to make or purchase everyone on my list a thoughtful, creative gift. This year, I have extra incentive to get some of my photo-based gifts made first – I purchased a couple of Groupons and they expire at the end of the month. Even without the looming Groupon expiration, placing my more time-consuming gift making earlier in the crunch period lessens my stress over things like shipping and delivery.

This past summer was a 90-day whirlwind between travel, festivals, summer camp and days at the pool, we were busy and we were also shutter-happy (my iPhone makes it so easy to snap, snap, snap). As a result, I have about 400 photos from just Memorial Day to Labor Day!

I’ve decided to upload all of my photos to Inkubook using the Autofill feature and have Inkubook do the heavy lifting by building a chronological album for me.

Selecting Autofill

Since I had a lot of photos to upload – two books worth – I will have about a 20 minute wait while Inkubook builds for me. Twenty minutes is a lot shorter than what it would take if I were placing the photos myself. I will need to go in and rotate and adjust a few photos, but again, much less time than if I’d done it manually. Note: Before uploading photos to Inkubook, sort through and delete or withhold any you don’t want to have included, or in the case of the iPhone, hold back on the duplicates (low-res vs hi-res) to prevent from double image uploading.

Photo upload process

I’m keeping it simple using the portfolio option with white pages. The only addition I need to make to each page is add black photo corners, because I dig photo corners. I also figure this look is easy enough to replicate and will provide consistency volume after volume.

Adding Corners

From start to finish this book took me about two hours to build a 200 page book from pressing “I want photos placed for me” to pressing the Buy button where I ordered four copies, one for us and one for each set of grandparents. Three heartwarming, handmade (ok, Autofilled) gifts in two hours.

Now, on to making holiday cards…

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Maybe it’s the word “labor”, but Labor Day makes me think of babies. They’re soft and cuddly and usually smell pretty sweet and they tend to be the focus of a lot of the pictures many of us take. Therefore, they make the perfect subjects for photo books.

Every Month of My Life

If you’re creative and have solid Photoshop skills you can create custom designs like in the image above. This baby book captures one photo a month, each month, of the baby’s first two years of life (that way it’s at least a 20 page book). The caption on every page is a song title and a CD was made to accompany the book when gifted to the grandparents.

The book below covers a shorter, but messier time period. This book is all about baby’s first foods. Each page is dedicated to a newly introduced food and captures baby’s reaction upon tasting. This book used a background provided in Inkubook’s cookbook theme and works great in this baby book (I like green beans too).

Baby Foodie

Inkubook has several backgrounds for baby-themed books, see some design options below. Our backgrounds even include  journal page options, so you can jot down the vital statistics and a few interesting memories about your prince or princess.

We also have pregnancy memory backgrounds, birth announcements and more. If you have pictures, we’ll help you find inspiration. And maybe over the long holiday weekend, you’ll have some time to create something beautiful.

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From waking the unwilling troops and filling their bellies with a nutritious breakfast, getting them out the door with book-loaded backpacks and on the bus before it drives off to after school snacks, homework and extracurricular activities, the school week is often a cantankerous blur.

With so much going on, we sometimes fly right by the sweet, fun and amazing moments like morning bed head, science project building, first snow bus stop treks, and A+ spelling tests.

What if you were issued a challenge? A 180-day challenge to take at least one photo of your kids every day for an entire school year from the school’s-back-in-session blues to the school’s-out-for-the-summer beaming smiles. Between compact digital cameras and smart phone cameras, taking a pic should be easy.

When June arrives, you’ll have an impressive collection of the little moments that add up to big smiles, laughs and a few tears as you look back over the events and non-events that made up the past year. Just upload to Inkubook and use Autofill to make a school year scrapbook – easy, quick and lasting.

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Group photo books are a great way to relive the moment with the ones you care about the most. Whether you and the gang attended a wedding, sporting event, or traveled the world, there wasn’t just one person there. So why capture the story from just one perspective? You shared the adventure; now share the memories & enjoy 30% off your books thru October 17th!

Invite others to your photo book. It’s as easy as A, B, C:

A

ASSEMBLE THE TEAM

After you’ve created your free account, have everyone else do the same. You can then easily invite people to the project you started by simply typing in their e-mail address and a message, or by pulling from existing address books in Gmail, Yahoo!, and other mail clients.

B

BUILD YOUR BOOK

Now the fun part begins. Once you invite everyone, they will be sent a link to upload their photos directly to the project, meaning no one has to deal with a bunch of e-mail attachments. You then decide what makes the cut for the book, and arrange everything in the templates we provide.

C

CONFIRM YOUR ORDER

Once everyone previews the book and likes what they see, you can go ahead and place your order. Your book is all done. And the best part — you didn’t have to do all the work yourself!

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The fall season is almost here and for many of us, that means football, tailgating and good times with family and friends. We’re celebrating the start of the new season with all new book sizes and cover styles. We’ve bolstered our photobook lineup with the 7×5 Mini Brag in hardcover and softcover styles starting at just $9.95. Plus, you can now make the 8.5×8.5 Simple Square in hardcover and the 8.5×11 Ultimate Portrait in softcover. Have you already made a Simple Square softcover or Ultimate Portrait hardcover and want to change to one of the new cover styles? Just select the “Copy Book” link while signed-in on your Inkubook member homepage and we will give you the option to change the cover with a single click.

Order any book, whether it’s one of the new rookies or one of our old veterans, by Sunday, September 27, 2009 and enjoy free standard ground shipping to U.S. addresses (or $8.99 off any other shipping method). Just enter code KICKOFF09 during checkout. (Code may be used once per customer. Not valid with any other offer or promotion).

So get started today. It’s always free to join and get creative with Inkubook. You only pay for printed photo books.

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For those of you who have been pregnant or have lived with someone pregnant, you’re likely aware of the “nesting instinct” that sets in just before baby arrives. This instinct causes many women to make cleaning, shopping and organizing top priorities. At 39 weeks pregnant, I had cleaned everything, bought all that I could, and organized and reorganized every nook and cranny in the house. When there was nothing left to do, I came up with something … getting a jump-start on baby’s first photo book.

Baby photo books made at Inkubook are printed on 100 lb. archival-quality
silk paper, which means they will stand up to years of enjoyment.

When my first daughter was born two years ago, I made a baby photo book  outlining our trip to the hospital, her birth, our time at the hospital, her first car ride and the first 72 hours at home, including her first bath on the kitchen counter. I finally got around to making that book when she was about 8 months old. I wish I had made that photo book sooner, when the events were fresher in my sleep-deprived mind.

This time would be different. This time, I had experience and a little inspiration from Laura, the professional organizer, mom of three and blogger of OrgJunkie on my side. Having made a baby photo book like this before, I already knew what sort of pictures I wanted to include. So, I logged on to Inkubook.com, and started the Simple Square baby photo book. The 8.5 square soft cover book fits nicely on a bookshelf and coffee table and in the diaper bag. I chose the Baby’s 1st Year theme. And in my super-organization state-of-mind, I began to lay out the photo book and write in some of the text I know I’ll want.

Photos you might want to include in your baby photo book:
- Mommy’s belly before and at hospital
- Cord cutting, hospital bath, bracelet
- Mommy, daddy, sibling, grandparents w/baby
- “Birth day” cake
- Car ride home
- First 72 hours at home – feeding, changing, napping, bath

After baby girl arrives and is finally taking a nap longer than 20 minutes, I’ll be able to upload all of the photos and place them in the book, share it with family and friends through Inkubook’s Invite Friends feature and order the photo book before she wakes for her next feeding. How’s that for organized?

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Things are going well with our upgrade to Microsoft Silverlight 2, and the best part is that we don’t expect our service to be interrupted today. The site is still functioning on the beta 2 version of Silverlight.

So what’s that mean, exactly? For most people who’ve not had a reason to download the new version of Silverlight, it means business as usual for making your books. You can sign in and get to work as you would on any other day.

For go-getters who’ve already downloaded and installed Silverlight 2, Inkubook won’t work for you at the moment unless you take matters into your own hands. The solution is to uninstall Silverlight 2 then visit http://inkubook.com where you’ll be prompted to install the beta version Silverlight. From that point, you can work on your book again. The alternative solution is to wait until we have Silverlight 2 installed, which will make everything function harmoniously for you.

We currently have Silverlight 2 running in our testing environment so we can make sure there are no kinks in it before we put it out there for you to use. We expect to complete the upgrade around 6:00 a.m. EST on Friday morning. At that time there will be an interruption to our service that we expect to be short. Check back here occasionally to learn if we’ve had to change our schedule.

If you’re having any problems with the site that don’t seem to be related to this issue, please email admin@inkubook.com and lend a hand.

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On Tuesday sometime after 8:00 a.m. EST we’ll be upgrading to the newest version of Microsoft Silverlight 2. This upgrade will give you a better Inkubook experience when it’s complete.

We’re not exactly certain when Microsoft will give us the go ahead to make the change, nor do we know exactly how many hours it will take. Throughout the day we’re going to keep our blog updated with the latest and greatest information we have, so visit frequently to find out when we expect to be back to wearing our book-making hats.

Any orders that are placed before the upgrade begins will still be processed according to our normal production schedule. You can expect to receive your book or books as planned (2-6 business days for printing plus the appropriate number of days for your chosen shipping method).

Thank you for your patience as we continue to make Inkubook better for you!
 

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Yesterday’s post explained how to get photos from your Flickr account into the Inkubook editing space. Today, I want to explore what can be done with Flickr in advance to save a little time in the creation process and to make everything run a little more smoothly.

Use Sets

Adding Photos to Sets in Flickr

Sets in Flickr allow you to group photos into virtual albums. Unlike real world albums, you can put individual photos into multiple sets. Prior to building your Inkubook, it would not be a bad idea to create a new set specifically for the book. Then you can then go and grab all of the photos in one fell swoop.

Rotate Your Photos

While Inkubook allows you to rotate your photos, it is within the context of your book and can only be done to one photo at a time. We are working on adding additional functionality here, but in the meantime there is always Flickr. If you have a lot of photos that need to be rotated, Flickr allows you to do so en masse via their Batch Organize tool. Simply drag the images into the editing pane and select “Rotate” from the “Edit photos” menu.

Edit Your Photos

Editing Photos in Flickr with Picnik

In a previous post, I had mentioned one of my new favorite image editing tools Picnik. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Flickr and Picnik have partnered to provide image editing services to Flickr members. To access the tool, simply select an image and click on the “Edit Photo” icon above it. You’ll be taken to an editing screen with all of your favorite Picnik tools. These include the basics of rotate, crop, resize, exposure, colors, sharpen, red-eye reduction, and auto-fix in addition to the rich Create toolset that allows for all kinds of powerful effects (see here for more details). Upon saving, the updated image is added to your Flickr photostream.

Name Your Photos

While we try to make it as easy as possible to identify your photos in Inkubook, there are some things that are really hard to see – the perennial “Is Kit making a stupid face?” question, for example. There is no easier way to identify a photo than with a good descriptive title. Be sure to add titles in Flickr prior to importing photos into Inkubook to avoid searching for that one good shot.

Other Important Stuff to Know

Import Order

Flickr exports photos to Inkubook in the order that they were loaded into Flickr. Any organizing and reordering that you do on Flickr will not have any affect on this. Import order is also affected by the sizes of photos, such that when Flickr exports a really big photo at the same time as a really small photo, the smaller photo is going to move a little quicker and is going to show up in your Inkubook photo collection first.
The largest impact here is going to be on the new Inkubook Autofill feature (a topic that we’ll touch on in a future post). The happy coincidence is that Autofill is great at grouping photos, and importng them from Flickr in the order they were photographed makes this even better.

The Benefit of Being a Pro

Finally, there are benefits to being a Pro. At Flickr, that means, in addition to all of the other pluses, that Inkubook can import your full size image, which will work in virtually all of our photo templates. For those who are not Pro members, we are only able to access the large size, which is a 1024 pixels wide, and may cause a few of those annoying low resolution alerts to appear.

Flickr and Inkubook are pretty much a match made in heaven. With a little forethought, you can use some of the tools and resources within Flickr to make the process of building your photo book all that much easier.

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