Here’s something you need to know about me: I’m pretty old fashioned when it comes to photos.
In the year of our lord 2023, I still get photos printed and make photo albums. For most of the thousands of pictures in my phone’s library, they can stay in the digital world. But those extra-special memories always make it into an album.
Needless to say, when it came to our engagement photos, I had to get them printed.
While we could have gone the traditional route of printing the photos and inserting them into a photo album or creating a scrapbook, I honestly couldn’t be bothered. What with all the DIY I’ve been doing for the wedding and the fact that ya girl has a 9-5 job, I wanted something a bit easier to manage. Additionally, I thought a photo book would look a little more sleek and professional than any scrapbooking job I could do.
I toyed with a few different services for creating a photo book. Ultimately, I landed on Vistaprint. I wish I could say that there was some in-depth reason why I chose them above say, Shutterfly. Honestly, the primary reason was that we’ve worked with Vistaprint before on our Save The Dates, Wedding Invitations, and even some photos & posters for around our house. They’ve always been easy to work with, quick to deliver, affordable, and high-quality. So, I knew and trusted them as a company!
This project took me about 4 hours to complete. But it definitely doesn’t have to take that long. I’m just a ✨perfectionist✨. There’s actually an option to upload your photos and have them auto-generated into a photo book template. While it looked fine that way, it didn’t feel very curated or personalized, so I opted to do it myself. Again, this could be a 5 minute process for you, if you don’t have control issues lol.
You can include a couple hundred photos in the photo book, depending on the size. I opted to go for the bigger size (portrait 8.5″ x 11″) and added about 100 pages or something like that. I literally could not choose between any of our photos, so I chose all of them instead. You only get married once, right?!
Vistaprint’s editor tool allows for a lot of customization. For each page, you get to decide what the layout looks like and how you want your photos arranged. But on top of that, there are a lot of options for decoration. You can change the background and add in text boxes, clip art, and masks (aka overlays for photos).
For the look I was going for, I didn’t want to add a lot of decoration. I wanted it to flow as a visual story on its own. I did add a couple text boxes, including a Taylor Swift lyric on the second-last page and a Pride and Prejudice (2005) quote on the last page. But I appreciated that there was a lot of options there, if I wanted to use them.
We went with the hardcover book option, with a photo cover. It allowed us to put our names on the spine, some details about the date & location on the back, and then decorate both the front and back covers with images. You could choose between a black or white cover but the white went a lot better with the scheme of our photo session.
We ended up printing three photo books—one for us, one for my parents, and one for my future in-laws. Vistaprint had a deal going on, so we ended up spending about $265 CAD before tax for the bundle. At about $88 per piece, with 100+ pages in each, it felt like a good deal to us.
If you’re looking into a great photo book service, whether it be for your engagement photos or wedding photos or even just a special memory you want to capture, I highly recommend working with Vistaprint. They usually have some sort of sale going, plus if you use Rakuten for cashback, they have great deals. As I’m writing this, you’re looking at getting 12% cashback on their website! I think it’s safe to say we’ll be using Vistaprint for our wedding photo book, too.
Did you create an engagement photo book? What service did you use? Did you like it? Let’s chat!
Looking for more wedding-related content? You can find it here!
