7.21.2013

TOS Review - Picaboo Yearbooks

What Is It?

Picaboo is an online program that makes it easy for users to create customized photo books, cards, calendars, and other photo items.  They are known for being easy to use and with very competitive pricing.

Picaboo is now offering a new service for creating yearbooks!  This is marketed towards all schools.  The site offers a ton of ideas to get you started as well as a quick turn around. There is no minimum order amount which makes it a great option for home schools to be able to show off all that they do during the year.  For this review, we were given the chance to create a soft cover, 20 page yearbook.


How We Used It?

I take an insane amount of pictures.  Really, it's nuts.

My laptop started moving a bit turtle-ish and after some investigating, Andrew told me it might be time to dump some of the 11,000 pictures I had from the past year.

Oops.

I make prints once a year of my favorites and put them in albums, but I'm very Type A and I want them to be sorted by date and event.  In my perfect world, I want an album for vacations, holidays, gardening.  What can I say, I like order.

So when I had the chance to create a yearbook through Picaboo's site that would display all of my pictures from this past school year in a neat book, I was all over it!



Picaboo's site was easy to use.  I just created my account, selected the size book I wanted, and started to create the pages.  I'm no scrapbooker, so the hardest part for me was choosing which pictures to add and what words to put on the pages.

Now I need to find some friends to sign her book!

My Opinion:

I think creating a yearbook for homeschoolers is an AWESOME idea!  Such a cool way to show off all that you've done over the year!  Our book is a great quality.  Pretty enough to display on the coffee table.  That's if I could sneak it out of Josie's room.  Because if I think I'm proud of our year, Josie is over the moon about it.  She loved seeing how much she changed and remembering how much fun we had.  Which will come in handy on those days she says she wants to go to "real" school!

I love that you get to pick what size book you want.  This allows you to stay in your price range.  They also offer free shipping and a fast turn around, both big pluses in my book.



The program was easy to use.  I would say you need to give yourself time to put it together.  It took me a couple of tries to get down how to create pages and I know that I didn't use all the features that were available.  If I'd had more time, I think I would have added little details to each page.  There are tutorial videos and online support available anytime you need it.

Some of the features include stickers, many fonts, borders, and a vast amount layout options.

The quality of the book was better than I expected.


I did a glossy finish and it turned out gorgeous.  Even though we ordered a soft cover this time, the cover is thick and seems like it will hold up well over the years.

I was super pleased with the price.  My book was soft cover and only 20 pages, but I was able to fit a ton of memories onto each page.  This size book costs under $10!  Super affordable in my opinion.  I'm sure I will have to add more pages for future years, but if you're looking to stay under a certain price point, this size did fit a lot of photos.




For this upcoming school year, I'm planning to create our yearbook as we go.  I can set up "sections" for each theme or trip that I want in the book, upload the photos, and leave them organized there until I am ready to create the pages.  Picaboo will save my work all year so at the end I will only have to order it!

This is an awesome idea and I highly recommend doing one for your homeschool!

Product Details:

Picaboo Yearbooks Website
Yearbooks Start at $8.49
Shipping starts at $8.99

Photobucket
 photo Disclaimer2_zpsff718028.gif

4 comments:

kimmer said...

What a great idea! I can't wait to see this finished product! Looks like a whole year of memories and all about two of my favorite little people!!!

Anonymous said...

How cool is that!!!!
Amy K.

Autumn said...

Wow! What a great idea!

Kaia said...

What a fun, FUN idea!! I'm guessing picaboo works for mac now? I had it but then it made me update and stopped working so I deleted it.