Field trips make for some of the most fun and memorable experiences for kids. This time of year, a field trip to a pumpkin patch or apple orchard can transform a regular school day into an exciting adventure to see something new.

Wherever there’s an opportunity to make memories, there’s an opportunity to snap some pictures, so make sure to pack a camera to catch all the great moments of the day; or make it a classroom event by encouraging other chaperones and teachers to take photos too. You can even get a child’s perspective by giving one lucky student a camera.

Then, use everyone’s snapshots to tell the story of the trip in a photo book. With Inkubook, gathering everyone’s photos  is a breeze, and if you’re ordering copies for the whole class, be sure to ask about our volume discounts (this way, you can give one to the teacher for free).

Even though the point of a field trip is to learn (we won’t tell if you don’t), there’s still plenty of fun to be had. So pack some extra snacks, grab your camera and enjoy the outing.

Kindergarten Apple Picking

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At the end of August we issued a challenge for you to take one photo a day, each day of the school year. Depending where you live, you’re just over or leading up to one month into the school year, so how are you doing? Have you taken at least one pic a day?

I’ve missed a couple of days, but on a few days I’ve taken ten or more photos, so I’m doing well.  If you’ve missed a few or more, don’t fret you still have another 8 months in the school year, so start snapping.

Initial Challenge blog post can be found here.

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Let’s face it, the tried-and-true, stand-in-a-row-and-smile style wedding photos are nice to have, but do they really capture the personalities of you and your better half?

With a wedding album from Inkubook, you make the call on what shots go into your own album. And you get to personalize it in ways that your average album just can’t accommodate.

Tips for Making Your Personalized Wedding Photo Book

• Never worry about yellowing, fading or loss: Clip your wedding announcement from the newspaper and scan it to include in the photo book. Do the same with other paper goods, such as your save-the-date, invitation and program. See if the best man and maid of honor are willing to give you their hand-written notes from their toasts, too!
• Experience your big day from another angle: Ask friends and family to include their email addresses in the guest book; then invite them to upload their snapshots so that you can include them in your book.
• Don’t miss any special moments: Ask a friend or family member to capture candid moments – the tiny groomsman and flower girl napping in the corner; you and grandma cutting a rug to “We Are Family;” the happy couple driving away in their decorated car.
• Give it the 3-D feel of a keepsake scrapbook by scanning small items such as the bride’s garter, the groom’s tie, a flower from the bouquet, lace from the dress, etc.

Other Ways to Use Inkubook for Your Wedding

Use our Great Big Square style in place of or to supplement the traditional album with a more personalized Inkubook.

Put together photos from your engagement shoot for a guest book that you’ll actually want to display after the wedding day.

No matter where you plan to go, your first trip as husband and wife is sure to be memorable. Capture the excitement in a honeymoon travel book.

MORE IDEAS

• Create unforgettable thank-you gifts for parents, grandparents or members of the wedding party.
• Think ahead to the first anniversary. Start uploading photos from your honeymoon and other more basic snapshots that will remind you of your first year together.
• No wedding coming up? No problem. Gather old wedding pics and mementos and create an anniversary album for parents or grandparents.
• As an alternative to a wedding slideshow, compile all your favorite and funniest photos of each other into a Mini Brag book that you can incorporate into your table centerpieces. Buy as few as 10 copies and you’re eligible for Inkubook’s volume discount of 15%.

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The vacation photobook. The photo calendar. The baby photo book. With all of those personalized photo projects adorning the walls of your life, one thing is clear: you are a bona fide Inkubook artiste!

You just can’t live without compiling some of your most cherished memories into a beautiful collage every once in a while, can you? Well, there’s nothing wrong with that. A dazzling photo book is something that you can be proud to share, unlike your other more questionable artistic endeavors, such as karaoke singing and potholder crocheting.

So now that you have become the Picasso of the photo book world, Inkubook has decided to construct a virtual Louvre in honor of your work. We’ve cooked up a new member homepage design, the Inkubook Gallery Bookshelf, which makes it easier to navigate through and find your favorite projects.

Check out the new setup:

All your projects are conveniently displayed in small thumbnail form and categorized by project type. You can find any calendar, photobook or card by simply scrolling through the easy-to-use gallery. With this view, locating, editing and ordering more copies of your favorite project is a cinch.

We noticed that more than a few of our customers had photobook projects called “My Photo Book.” Sound familiar? Another little helpful feature that we’ve added is the ability to rename your projects. Click on your project from the Gallery Bookshelf and rename your project to something more helpful.

So revel in your love for Inkubook. With the Gallery Bookshelf, it’s easier and more fun than ever to make beautiful, lasting keepsakes and gifts with your digital photos. What are you waiting for? Make something gorgeous today!

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Some people are just on top of everything. They’re always on time, never miss deadlines, and they have no concept of what it means to procrastinate. You know them well. We’re talking about that friend from college who always prepared weeks in advance for the big exam, and was cool as a cucumber the night before while you and everybody else ran around like chickens with your heads cut off. Or what about that perfect colleague who always seems to turn around projects so much quicker than you? Don’t they just make you want to hurl?! Yuck!

Fortunately for you, we may have just the solution to all of your punctuality woes: a personalized photo calendar from Inkubook. You’ll be giving that old goody-two-shoes in your life a real run for their money after you start using your new calendar. Or if you are reading this post Mr. Goody-Two-Shoes, you can get a photo calendar for yourself to make sure you stay on time in the new year.

We’ve got some great calendar ideas that will work for anyone:

• The Lovers Calendar: When you’re in love, there’s nothing that compares to spending time with that special person. You can take your favorite photo memories of you and your sweetie and use them to create a calendar that will make you smile every day of the year.

• The Resolution Calendar: We all start the new year in pretty much the same fashion: setting goals that we intend to reach before the year ends. With your own images or pictures of others, you could use your calendar as a constant reminder of the things you want to achieve in 2011.

• The Family and Friends Calendar: You’ve got so many special people in your life, and keeping up with all their birthdays, anniversaries, and special events can be quite daunting. To make sure you don’t forget anyone, you could place images on the months of big events that help you remember everything that’s going on with your loved ones.

Calendars start at just $24.95. Now that’s a very small price to pay for being on top of things for a whole year, right? With the holiday season right around the corner, you can make one and gift one and save 40%. Check out more details about our calendars here.

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We’re known for our gorgeous photo books and calendars but this year we’re starting a new tradition with personalized photo stationery cards. Our new 4×8 Flat Stationery Cards are a fun and festive way to send well wishes to everyone on your list. Unlike those flimsy photo paper cards you get at the drugstore, Inkubook photo stationery cards are professionally printed on thick, premium cardstock.

Choose from several different backgrounds, layouts, photo borders and up to 4 photos to make this year’s holiday card uniquely yours. Or, if you’re a digital scrapbooker, you will love our Do-It-Yourself full-bleed card template that allows you to upload custom layouts. If you plan on making a photo book or calendar anytime soon, you also have a chance to sample a free set of our new cards.

Place any book or calendar order of $30 or more by Friday, November 6, 2009. Enter code FREECARDS during checkout and we’ll send you a personal coupon code good for a set of 12 cards with envelopes. You must then redeem your free card coupon by November 25, 2009 and pay applicable shipping charges. One use per customer. Not valid with any other promotion or offer.

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While it might be a little early to look ahead to next year, it’s never too early to start working on a personalized photo calendar. At 19×13.5 inches, the Super Big Calendar can hold more than 100 of your favorite photos. We have updated templates for 2010 so you can get a jump on making one of the most popular holiday gifts of the season.

Make your Super Big Calendar by October 31, 2009 and enjoy complimentary standard ground shipping to U.S. addresses (or $8.99 off any other shipping method). Just enter code SHIPCAL10 during checkout. (Code may be used once per customer. Not valid with any other offer or promotion).

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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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This week at Inkubook, we’re celebrating Flickr and all of the sweet functionality they bring to to the process of building your Inkubook. To commemorate the occasion, we’re extending a Free Book Offer to Flickr members. To find out all of the details visit our special Flickr page on Inkubook.com.

Personally, I think that Flickr and Inkubook make a pretty heroic combination, so much so that I was inspired to build a little comic to walk you through the process of getting your photos from Flickr in to your drop-dead gorgeous photo book.

Checkout the comic here.

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In their FAQs, Picnik describe themselves thusly:

Picnik is photo editing awesomeness, online, in your browser. It’s the easiest way on the Web to fix underexposed photos, remove red-eye, or apply effects to your photos.

Seems like it would be tough to undersell yourself in a paragraph that uses the phrase “photo editing awesomeness,” but that’s just what Picnik does here. I previously posted on using GIMP to edit your images. While extremely powerful, GIMP is likely a little more tool than most users need. That is where Picnik comes in. Picnik offers the standard tools for rotating, cropping, and resizing your images, plus it has some additional tools like color adjustments, red-eye reduction and sharpening. All these things can be very valuable, but they don’t exactly exemplify “photo editing awesomeness.” The awesomeness comes in under the “Create” tab, where you can access a slew of filters and enhancements that achieve stunning effects with absolutely minimal effort.

Panography-ish Filter – Create Effects within Picnik

The interface for Picnik is perhaps the most usable I have seen for an image editing tool, better than even iPhoto. Applying effects is as easy as clicking a button and then playing with the associated sliders (even this description doesn’t do justice to the simplicity). There are 33 effects in total (two of these are available only to Premium Members). The results of all are dead-on and would require some heavy lifting in Phototoshop to achieve.

The samples below demonstrate the results of a handful of my favorite filters:

Original Image

Boost Effect

Cinemascope Effect

1960s Effect

The beauty of Picnik is that it provides an environment where you can play with your images without risk of destroying them, and once you get started it is, quite honestly, hard to stop. Best of all, Picnik is free. Some advanced features, like full-screen mode, additional effects, and the ability to work with a greater number of photos, are available for a $24.95 annual charge. It is a great way to add some awesomeness to the photos in your drop-dead gorgeous Inkubook.

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