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Confession: Last week I purchased an ADDITIONAL 1 TB external hard drive solely to store all of the photos I’ve taken this year alone! Digital photography has revolutionized both the industry and our day-to-day documentation of memories, but the downfall is that I take way too many pictures, many of which never leave my desktop. One of the things I recently started doing is creating themed photo books featuring my favorites from a given event, period of time, or location. While I’ll still have a seemingly endless collection of photos stored on drives throughout my home, printing out my favorites means that they’ll get seen!
Like many moms, lack-of-time is often the obstacle to doing things like scrapbooking or organizing all of the photos I’ve taken into collages, frames, and photo books. For many parents, their smart phone is their primary camera, used to capture everything from first steps, the first day of school, and the first home run. In an age where photos are shared immediately with friends and family on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, there seems to be less of a need to print out photos. But what happens if you wash your phone with the laundry (0r the dishes)? Or you lose it? Or one of your favorite social media platforms is hacked and your photos are lost? Having dropped my hard drive a couple of years ago and NEVER recovering all of that data, I’m vigilant about not only backing up my computer regularly, but printing out my favorite photos and organizing them into photo books.
With all of the services currently available for creating photo books, it’s difficult to know which one to use. If you’re looking for ease of use, affordability, and one of the oldest and most reputable names in photography history, you’ll want to check out the Kodak Picture Kiosks housed inside your local CVS/pharmacy. We spent quite a bit of time traveling this summer, and given the fact that I have at least 5,000 photos from the 3 trips combined, I thought I’d make a photo book of our very first visit to Maui.
There are two options for creating a personalized photo book either online in the comfort of your home, or at your local CVS/pharmacy store. I opted to try out the Kodak Picture Kiosk at my local CVS/pharmacy and I was amazed at how intuitive the software is and how quickly I was able to create and receive my photo book.
Before you begin, you’ll want to decide the style, size and color you prefer for the book and the cover. A 4×6 Single-Sided Photo Book starts at just $4.99 and prices increase depending on the size and number of pages you want in the book. Photos can be uploaded via SD card, USB, CD-Rom, smartphone, and social media sites including Facebook and Instagram. You can also “scan” your photos in or upload from CVSphoto.com.
I decided to import my photos from Instagram because I was really intrigued by this new capability to create projects from social media sharing sites. I simply logged into my Instagram account from the kiosk and selected the specific photos from Maui that I wanted included in the book. The kiosk can sort the photos which I found very helpful given the fact that I have so many within that app. The kiosk offers a pretty expansive selection of themes to choose from and I opted for a beachy travel-inspired theme complete with sunshine and sand. You can then select the specific photo you’d like to be featured on the cover and the kiosk will then arrange the photos for you in the most fitting way.
I can be a bit Type A when it comes to creating projects like this so I actually appreciated the fact that the kiosk does a lot of the work. The entire process took me about 30 minutes to complete and that included the time needed for my local store to print and bind the book. I’ve created photo books in the past that have taken hours to complete simply because I’ve spent too much time editing, arranging and re-arranging until I think it’s “perfect.” The beauty of being able to print from Facebook, Instagram, and even my smartphone is that I don’t have to spend a lot of time doing this. A limited number of editing features are available including the ability to resize (zoom, crop) and enhance your photos and add text to any page. If you’re a Photoshop user like I am, you might find the editing features a bit limited but if you’ve already enhanced and cropped them on Facebook or Instagram, you likely won’t need to do much. One other thing to note is that the more enhancements you add within the kiosk, the more likely it is that your photos won’t be as crisp when printed. As far as the size of the photos, if you’re using an app like PicTapGo, which allows you to include full-length or full-width photos, you’ll have some white space in your photo book layout.
While the photo book was being printed and bound, I decided to create a canvas print with one of my favorite photos from our trip to Arizona this past summer. Because this particular project is not done in-house, I had to wait about a week for the canvas to arrive. Creating this project took just minutes and simply included resizing my photo to fit the kiosk’s parameters once I uploaded the photo (which I had edited at home) from my SD card. If you would like a large-sized canvas, be sure to choose a high-resolution photo so that you don’t see any blur or grain when it is printed.
Kodak Picture Kiosks are located inside select CVS/pharmacy locations nationwide. You can find your nearest location by visiting their website or you can download one of 3 apps to create projects or print photos directly from your device once in-store.
The holidays are just around the corner and I think these photo gifts are an easy, affordable way to document and share the memories you’ve made this past summer. In addition to photo books and canvas prints, Kodak Picture Kiosks allow you to create greeting cards, calendars, posters, prints, Picture Movie DVDs and more. While some of these projects aren’t available for Free Same Day Pickup, CVS/pharmacy offers free shipping to your local store.
Right now you can take advantage of the following savings:
50% off 11×14 and 24×36 Canvas Prints with the code CANVASNOW
25% off photo blankets with the code BLANKET25
45% off custom cover photo books with the code CCBOOK45
25% off enlargements and collages with the code BIGPRINT
10 cent 4×6 prints (min 75) with the code PRINT75
Be sure to use your CVS Extra Care Card for additional savings at the CVS Photo Center.