When I fish, I rarely keep what I catch. Oh sure, I’ll keep a few crappie and a couple white bass each year, and few things taste better than walleye. But on average, I give ‘em a big smile and set ‘em free. Of course, I always take a picture first.
Over the years I’ve wound up with stacks of pictures from fishing trips long past. Many of them are pictures of my children when they were younger, or friends that no longer live nearby. In other words, they are irreplaceable.
And yet, most of them are confined to a box in the back of my closet. Last year, I vowed to be better. I promised myself that I wasn’t going to have another year of fishing come and go without doing something special with all those pictures. What I found was the 12×12 travel classic book
. And in this article, I’ll show you how you can make one of your own.
First things first, right click on this link Shutterfly.com
and choose “Open in New Window“. Click the “Get started” button, fill in your information, and then click the “Join now” button. That’s it. You’re a member and now you’re ready to start your photobook.
Now you’ll want to navigate to the “My Shutterfly” page. On virtually every page, you’ll see a toolbar like this one. Clicking on the “My Shutterfly” button will take you there. 
Now you’re going to want to create a new album to hold all your photos. So click the “New Album” link in the “My recent albums” section.
The new album will be named, “New Album” which isn’t very creative, so hover your mouse over the right corner of the highlighted area around “New Album” and left click the drop down arrow. This will bring up the context menu you see above. Click “Rename” to give the album a more meaningful name.
Just enter the name you want for your album in the textbox provided.
Your screen should look a bit like this now. Click the “upload pictures” link to add photos to your album.
When adding your pictures, make sure that the option is selected next to “Add to an existing album” and that the correct album has been chosen from the drop down menu.
Click the “My Shutterfly” button.
In the “My projects” section, click the “Photo books” link.
Now click the “Go” button under “12×12 Memory Book.” NOTE: these instructions will work even if you choose a different size of book.
Now select the type of cover you want and then click the “Get started” button.
Now we’re making some progress. This is the style page. Here you can choose the base background (the default color of all the pages which you can change later if you want), and you can select which font you want to use. Don’t stress too much on this step, you can come back at anytime and change your choices.
Click the “Next” button when you’re done.
Click the “Next” button when you’re done.
We’re almost to the best part now… On this page, we select which pictures we want to make available to the photo book by clicking the “Get pictures” button. You will be able to add more at any time from here on out, but if you spend a minute now deciding which ones to use in your book, you’ll save yourself time later on.
On this screen, you can select individual pictures to add to your photobook project, or, as I have done here, you can select entire albums. When you’re done, click the “Add to Photobook” button and you’re ready.
After clicking the “Add to Photobook” button, you’ll be presented with this screen. This screen confused me at first, but they are only asking if you want to add more pictures now. You can always come back and add more later, so click the “No” button
From now on, you can navigate through the pages of your book with this tool bar. Just click on the page you want to view and you’ll be taken there. But before we go any further…
Save your photobook.
Now for the fun parts… At this point I’m sure you could take off on your own and complete your masterpiece without me, and feel free if you’d prefer. But for those of you that would like to stick around, I’m going to spend this last section showing you the basics of setting up your pages.
First, the layout. By selecting a page in your photobook and then selecting a layout from the tab on the left, your page will be transformed into that layout. As you can see below, I’ve selected a 4 image layout on the left and page 2 has been remade in that style. Experiment with different ones and find a few favorites.
When we first started, we chose a base background for our book in the Style section. We can return to the Style section if we want to and change our background, but that would change the background of each page. What if we want to only change the background for the current page? We use the “Backgrounds” tab. Select the page you want to change, open the “Backgrounds” tab, and choose your new background.
We’re also not stuck with the edges we chose in the Style section either. We can change the edges of the pictures on a given page the same way we changed the background. Just select the page we want to alter, open the “Edges” tab, and select the edges that you’d like to have on this page.
Finally, we’re ready to add pictures to our pages. Just drag and drop them into place, and most of the time that’s all there is too it. But, what if a picture is turned the wrong way, or you’d like to crop the image a bit?
Double clicking the image will open the “Edit picture” frame. From this window, we can resize, rotate, and remove red eye from our pictures. Just click “Done” when you’re finished.
Depending on the layouts you choose, you’ll be able to add captions to your pictures. Simply double clicking on the caption will open the “Edit text” window. This window even has a built in spell checker.
As you progress, you’re going to want to see how your book is going to look as a finished product. Clicking the “Preview” button will let you take an interactive tour of your book at any time.
I hope you have found this article useful. Good luck with your book.
In this shot, I wanted to include Kettle Top without completely ignoring this fine white bass. Again, by placing the fish along the vertical line dividing the left two thirds of the frame, I’m able to show more scenery without taking all the focus away from the fish.
