Chatbooks is a company that prints 6x6 or 8x8 inch photo books from Instagram, Facebook, Google, Dropbox, or right from your camera roll on your phone or computer.
I have 4 children and each have their own instagram account that only I see. I like this because I can post as many pictures as I want and add captions and the pictures are edited, sometimes put into collages, and I can choose different filters to make the pictures look interesting and fun.
The best part is you can do it easily right from your phone! This has been key for me since all of my pictures are on my phone. I dedicate about 20 minutes each week and upload pictures from my phone to my private instagram account for my child.
When I’m uploading to Instagram I like to select the pictures for that child from my camera roll and then put it into an album on my phone with that child’s name. Then when I’m posting to their Instagram I can just select that particular album on my phone and the pictures are in chronological order and only show the pictures of that child. This makes the process much more simple!
I love to include pictures of their schoolwork, art projects, sometimes I even take pictures of my kids’favorite toy or their room. It just kind of makes it fun for them to look back in an album and see those extra pictures personal to that particular age in their life. And I don’t feel so bad throwing things away!
You don’t have to upload to Chatbooks from Instagram but the advantage is that your pictures will be edited, captioned, and in order. I also like the thought that if I lost my phone or something and my pictures hadn’t been backed up to the cloud, I would have the option to get these pictures off of Instagram safe and sound.
The important thing here is to find a system that works for you and stick with it so those thousands of pictures on your phone can be condensed and enjoyed!
Once I have my child’s Instagram posts caught up, I just login to chatbooks app from my phone and choose “create custom book”and enter the Instagram account info (or you could directly upload pics from Facebook or your camera roll on your phone at this point). I like to do one hard cover book for each child for each year. I usually have about 200 pages that goes into one of these books and it costs me about $50. From there you can select pictures you want to exclude or captions you might want to change. Sometimes I play around with the order of the pictures and I upload a cute collage for the cover. It’s easy to do from my phone and once I have previewed the book I just hit “click”and it’s in the mail within a few days. It’s a pretty amazing gift and one that can be made in multiples for grandparents, or replaced if damaged.
Sometimes it seems overwhelming to start the process of “scrapbooking” but I’ve found it’s so much easier in this digital age. The best advice I received was to just start with the current year and go from there. If you get time to work backwards that’s great but just focus on this year!
Another fun idea if you don’t want to do individual books for your children is to print a custom book for your family each year from your Instagram account or pics from your phone. It would be neat to do in an 8x8 size that is a little bit larger. I have also liked using Shutterfly to create a larger 10x10 family album and you can also upload pictures off Instagram and Facebook and your camera roll directly to the site to make it easier.
There are many different companies out there that offer these custom books. However, if you’re a “beginner”I suggest starting with Chatbooks and going from there - it’s a very simple way to get your pictures into books with just a few clicks! Good luck Moms - you can do this!