Chraela,  Lifestyle,  Series,  Wedding

Our Wedding Album (+ a Shutterfly Sale!)

Just a quick post for today – things have been crazy but I wanted to at least post SOMETHING since it’s been a while! I have a ton of posts in my drafts I’ve been working on but nothing to post just yet…until today haha. I wanted to pop in and just share a short post about our wedding album!

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As soon as we got our wedding photos back I knew I wanted to use them in a bunch of different ways, to display and look at forever! One of the ideas I had was a huge album full of photos that told the story of our day. It just so happened that the photo printing site Shutterfly was having a great sale right around when we got home from our honeymoon, so I took advantage of it and now we have a STUNNING photo book!

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Shutterfly makes a lot of really cool products from photos you upload, like stationery, calendars, customized frames, mugs, pillows, and of course prints and photo books. You can customize pretty much everything about what you order which is super cool! They also have some really nice wedding things, like invitations, save the dates, and thank you cards – super handy if you’re planning a wedding as well.

For our wedding album, I chose a 10×10 photo book. I knew that I wanted a hard cover album and their super cool lay flat pages, so no one’s face got scrunched up from being on the inside cover of the book.

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Shutterfly gives a few options for creating your book. You can choose “simple path”, where you set a preset layout and backgrounds and it will automatically place your photos, or you “custom path”, where you can customize every detail about every page, including text and photo layouts. OR they even have a “make my book” option, where you just submit your photos and one of their professionals will make the entire book for you! I’m very hands on and wanted to make our book just the way I wanted it, so I chose the custom path option.

Making our book was fun but I’ll be honest, it was kind of a lot of work. There’s a lot of different themes and styles to choose from and it was overwhelming to start with, but I basically started by adding every preset “wedding” layout they offered and choosing what I liked from there. They have SO MANY cool preset layouts and stickers and borders and backgrounds….you can really add as many or as few as you like. By the time I was done with ours I must have looked through hundreds of different design options.

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LOVED these super cute Best Man & Maid of Honor stickers!

I used a lot of preset things but I also made my own page designs quite a bit. Sometimes I had a specific picture that I wanted to showcase a certain way, and other times I just clicked a preset option and put photos in more randomly. It was very time-consuming but I also loved going through and telling the story of our wedding day (a story I will tell here soon too, I promise!)

I loved being able to put everything just how we wanted it, and add text so we could write about specific parts of the day we wanted to remember in the future.

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We want to remember everything about the wedding, especially our cake and cupcakes.

When I finally finished designing everything exactly how we wanted it, our book was 104 pages!!!! And the total was pretty high BUT…here’s the really fun part. So Shutterfly regularly has sales going on – when you sign up you get a bunch of offers for free prints and things, and I get emails all the time for sales up to 40% off of everything. But there was a particularly good one at the time I was ordering our album, which offered unlimited extra pages to be added to any photo book for free! I knew that our photo book was going to be HUGE so I had to take advantage of the sale and I saved sooo much money in the process!! My photo book would have originally cost almost $300 but with the extra pages I got for free, my total was only $67!

Screen Shot 2018-03-14 at 17.55.02.pngI’m legit amazed look at this!!

And the SAME sale happens to be going on right now through Sunday the 18th, so I wanted to share this with you right away in case you could take advantage of it!! If you use the code MOREPAGES you can get as many extra pages as you want, totally for free 🙂 They also have a 40% off sitewide sale going on as well with code FORTY4U if you’d prefer that one! I have had some luck in the past with stacking discount codes, so it may not hurt to try a few different ones to see how low you can get the price.

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One of my favorite spreads, with a bunch of cute photos from our reception!!

So I ordered our book and just a few days later it arrived, and it is SO stunning! The hard cover is really nice quality and all our photos look great. I’m also in love with the lay flat pages – the photos look beautiful and no one’s face got smushed up in the middle.

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Shutterfly also has a little refer a friend program, too – if you sign up through this link you’ll get a free 8×8 photo book! The 8×8 size is really cute, I’ve already ordered a few of them as gifts as well 🙂 When I signed up I also got a bunch of other free offers including 50 free 4×6 prints, AND if you download their app you can get a bunch of free stuff too. Basically, if you do this right Shutterfly makes it easy to get a lot of stuff for free or very cheap haha

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Anyway – I am THRILLED with our wedding photo book and I’m so glad that I was able to get such a good price for it as well!! It really tells the story of the whole day, and it’s a beautiful keepsake to have for the future <3 As usual all our beautiful wedding photos are from Jake at Courage & Co Photography! If you’d like to read more wedding posts you can check them all out here 🙂 Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed this post!

xo!

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