How to Create an Online Photo Album This Summer with Mixbook
Summer is one of the friendly seasons that people always look out for every year. For most of us, this is when we meet new people, take on adventurous trips and enjoy the outdoors to its fullest with families and friends. Let’s face it; not every experience is worth living in unpreserved memories that can fade away with time. Whether you are camping or just taking a few adventurous trips to enjoy the summer, you need more than boxes of pictures and remnants of song books to remember the season and what a great fun it is. You need a reliable system to preserve those memories, including the songs, smells, stories, menus, skits and the names and faces of the people that camped or participated in one activity or the other with you and/or your family. An online photo album is, of course, a perfect answer – thanks to the world of technology we live in today! Few years ago, people were forced to preserve pictures in their boxes or with a physical family album they believed would not go bad sometime soon. However, with an online photo album, we are offered even more benefits; not only preserving worthwhile memories but taking advantage of various other elements, like the addition of effects and arts, and using several sharing options and privacy control features.
Yes, to create an online photo album, your first step should be to choose a matching theme and then, blending it with additional elements to preserve exactly what you want in the way you like. But with mixbook, the process is more of fun and excitement, including several other features to give you the result you deserve.
Creating an Online Photo Album with Mixbook
Mixbook offers an easy-to-use software system that customers can use to create customizable photo products including cards, calendars and photo books. However, for your summer fun and adventures trips, you’d like it to be preserved with a digital photo book. Hence to create your mixbook photo book, you have to start from navigating to their website and create an account; this requires only your name, email address and password. With these, you will gain instant access to the system.
The basics: From the top menu on mixbook’s website, click on the ‘create’ tab and in the following spaces, type in a title for the photo album, a description (though not mandatory), and your privacy settings (which is set to allow your mixbook friends to view your book by default). Hence you are given control over who gets access to your memory bank. Additionally, if you’d like anybody to help you in the creation of the photo book, say a family member that witnessed the summer camping with you, a new friend with whom you shared the same tent or simply somebody with a bit more knowledge of art works, just type in their email address. Mixbook will automatically send them an invitation to join you! I was playing around with this last time and my wife gave me an unexpected call in the afternoon asking, “What do you need help with?” Yes, I finally got her to send a couple of images!
Design: The next step is where you choose the most appropriate size that fits your project. Mixbook features a couple of sizes you can choose from when creating your digital photo album. Mostly, people prefer using the 11 by 8 ½ landscape size and that has become my favorite too. Once you are done with this, you need to select a theme. And again, there are several ready templates you can choose from. After selecting the theme, you will be directed to the editor page where you will have access to all the necessary tools with which you can modify a page to suit your interest, like duplicating, adding or splitting a page.
The page editor still features four basic design tabs available on the left side bar. The first tab will allow you to upload the photos you want to use in your book. Remember those camping photos, the campfire night or the photos from your adventurous trip in the forest with friends. It doesn’t matter whether they are shared on facebook, flickr, or laying on the hard drive on your PC; mixbook can help you fetch them wherever they are, including those on Smug Mug, Picasso and others. The integration the system has with these social sites will allow you easy access to your photos so you can pull them over and place them where they belong. When I wanted to create my first book, I had to download all the photos I wanted to use and never thought of a feature like this. You need to see how my wife laughed at me; never knew I didn’t need all those hard works!
Create more pages: Once the photos are uploaded, you can add them to pages by just dragging and dropping them where you want. You will also have access to several customization tools, including one that can rotate the photo, resize it, and add several effects, a sticker and many other elements. You can also add several other pages, customize your pages to contain specific number of photos through the layout options, add description texts for each photo or page and customize the background. I love using the picture of the camping venue as my background when doing a book for my annual summer camps. Despite being a memory refresher on its own, it complements the theme of the event, and my family and few featured friends have all loved it.
Additional Tips
When creating a photo book, ensure to include as many photographs as possible and the names of every significant person, or just about everyone you can get hold of, especially if it is a camp. You can make the book a true memory refresher if you include camp songs, poems, sayings and inside jokes. If you don’t have two full pages of texts, you won’t have a hard time adding any of these using the Mixbook system.