Digital Scrapbooks
Photo memory books

Digital scrapbooks or photo memory books made it so easy for me to record my stories after my husband died. I now create them regularly for each year of my son’s life, as well as special vacations we take. Recently for my niece’s birthday, I made her a personalized story book of an imaginary adventure she and my son took in pursuit of dinosaurs. It included photos from our vacation with their family, which ended in a dinosaur museum.

People ask me which online memory book company I use when I create a memory book. I have used two Picaboo and Blurb.

What I love about Picaboo

• extremely easy to use
• one of the best programs for beginners
• free software to download
• easy to follow tutorials
• over 90 page layout options
• over 15,000 free custom backgrounds, in other words whether I am doing a book for my son or my grandmother, I always find beautiful backgrounds that fit the feel of the book
• they frequently offer great coupons
• great quality books and pages
• books as low as $9.99
• higher quality book options for those once in a life-time events
• great customer service, after a computer crash they spent hours on the phone with me, restoring old photo book files to my computer
• they provide web space to send your book to friends and family for online viewing

What I love about Blurb

• believe it or not I’ve come to the place where (for some books) 90 layouts doesn’t feel like enough for me, with Blurb, the options are limitless as you can edit any layout. However, with more freedom there is much more room for error. Blurb may feel difficult and overwhelming to learn if this is your first time creating digital scrapbooks.
• I like the text flow-over from page to page. Again more of an advanced feature that can be a bit difficult to deal with for first timers.
• Blurb provides much more freedom to be creative and do your own thing, just remember where there is more freedom there is also more room for error.
• prices for larger books are slightly cheaper, but they have less coupons and no small photo book options
• greater page allowance before price increases

So my general recommendation for online memory books are:

• start with Picaboo for easy to make, high quality, beautiful photo memory books
• if (and it doesn’t always happen) 90 layouts starts to feel confining and you want to expand your creative capacity give Blurb a try

Get more digital scrapbooks ideas at my Make Memory Books page.

Photo memory books also make wonderful Visual Grief Jouranls.

Other articles related to photo memory books:
Children and Grief Memory Book
Grief Journal Scrapbook
Memory Book
Personalized Sympathy Gift Memory Book
Scrapbook Journaling
Memories Scrapbook
Starting a Memory Book

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