We’re known for our gorgeous photo books and calendars but this year we’re starting a new tradition with personalized photo stationery cards. Our new 4×8 Flat Stationery Cards are a fun and festive way to send well wishes to everyone on your list. Unlike those flimsy photo paper cards you get at the drugstore, Inkubook photo stationery cards are professionally printed on thick, premium cardstock.
Choose from several different backgrounds, layouts, photo borders and up to 4 photos to make this year’s holiday card uniquely yours. Or, if you’re a digital scrapbooker, you will love our Do-It-Yourself full-bleed card template that allows you to upload custom layouts. If you plan on making a photo book or calendar anytime soon, you also have a chance to sample a free set of our new cards.
Place any book or calendar order of $30 or more by Friday, November 6, 2009. Enter codeFREECARDSduring checkout and we’ll send you a personal coupon code good for a set of 12 cards with envelopes. You must then redeem your free card coupon by November 25, 2009 and pay applicable shipping charges. One use per customer. Not valid with any other promotion or offer.
While it might be a little early to look ahead to next year, it’s never too early to start working on a personalized photo calendar. At 19×13.5 inches, the Super Big Calendar can hold more than 100 of your favorite photos. We have updated templates for 2010 so you can get a jump on making one of the most popular holiday gifts of the season.
Make your Super Big Calendar by October 31, 2009 and enjoy complimentary standard ground shipping to U.S. addresses (or $8.99 off any other shipping method). Just enter code SHIPCAL10 during checkout. (Code may be used once per customer. Not valid with any other offer or promotion).
Now share your pics with friends, fans & family and express your photo book creativity at the same time. If you use Facebook, MySpace, Windows Live, Gather or other social networking sites, you can now share your Inkubook photo books online. Feel free to browse through the photo books posted by some of our fans on Facebook to see how they look. Are you a blogger? Inkubook photo book widgets work great with WordPress, TypePad and Blogger. Jazz-up your next post with a fun, interactive mini-version of your book that readers can flip through right on your blog.
The bloggers at Barefoot Mommies, named one of the 50 most influential Mom Blogs by Nielsen Online, recently posted a photo book widget on their site – check it out for yourself. They think the new widget sharing feature rocks. We want to know what you think. Flip-through this book made by some Inkubook fans having a fun time at a recent Coldplay concert. Thanks for sharing guys – looks like you had awesome seats!
It’s easy to make and share your photo book widget. From your Inkubook homepage or book editor page, simply click the pink SHARE button and follow the directions. It only takes a minute or so to create. When it’s done click the GET & SHARE button to choose from several different sharing methods, including social network pages, blogs, email or embedding it into any website. Give it a try and tell us what you think!
It’s happened again. You told us about a feature you’d like Inkubook to include, and we made it happen. We now have a tool that lets you copy photos from one project to another.
It’s quite simple to use. Any time you go to get photos for a project, whether that happens at the very beginning as you’re creating a project or while you’re in the middle of editing, you’ll be able to choose from three options: upload from your computer, import from Flickr, or transfer from another Inkubook project. This is what the Select Your Photos screen looks like with this new addition:
Click the button next to the Inkubook logo to see a list of the projects you can copy photos from.
The next screen you see will open to show all the photos that are included in the project you worked on most recently. You can use the drop-down menu at the top right of the box to select which project you want to copy photos from. After you’ve selected the project, the thumbnails of those photos will appear. Click the photos you want to include (using the Shift or Ctrl keys to select multiple photos) then click the Import button. Here’s an example of the selection screen:
This is the screen where you select which photos you want to transfer to your project.
That’s all there is to it! Your photos will immediately be copied from one project to another. So whether you decide to make one of the new Inkubook calendars with photos you used in a book or you have to make two separate copies of a book because Aunt Marnie and Cousin Leroy haven’t spoken to each other since 1994 and wouldn’t appreciate a gift that included a picture of the other person, you can now get the photos you need out of one place and into another quite easily.
As for this habit we have of actually following through on making updates and improvements that you suggest, we’re not going to stop that any time soon. We’re just going to keep plugging away, so stay tuned for future updates.
At Inkubook, we’ve created background schemes to complement many different calendar and life events (such as weddings, babys’ births, and different seasons), and Halloween is no exception. While none of our backgrounds is so terrifying that your hair will turn white with fright, all of them are awfully cute and seasonable.
The Kughens get busy decorating pumpkins.
As you can see, I’ve used the Candy Corn and Happy Jack o’ Lantern backgrounds with photos from this year’s pumpkin decorating. I think they make the perfect backdrop for our pumpkin construction process. Here’s a peek at the full collection of Halloween backgrounds:
One of my favorite things about the Inkubook background collections is that you don’t have to use only the backgrounds that are in the theme you pick when you first start your book. For example, my husband and I will be making a book to give to our mothers for Christmas. It’ll cover the past 12 months, starting with Christmas of last year, so of course we’ll want to use a variety of backgrounds that coordinate with each type of photo we have. Seashells and flip-flops for our trip to Florida, Meow and Woof for our cat and dog, and, of course, the aforementioned backgrounds for Halloween.
If it comes as a surprise to you that you can add more backgrounds to your Backgrounds gallery, here’s a brief tutorial. (This also gives me an opportunity to mention that we gave our editor a little makeover at the end of last week. Things are better organized and easier to find than before, so make sure to check it out.)
The tabs at the top of the updated editor,
with the Backgrounds tab highlighted. Notice
the blue Get More Backgrounds button.
When you’re ready to browse for backgrounds that aren’t in the collection that goes with the theme you chose when you started your book, make sure you’re on the Backgrounds tab (now located at the top of your editor screen) and click the blue Get More Backgrounds button. A screen with the full array of backgrounds will open. You can browse them all and decide which you want to include in your book. Click the one you want then click Apply. The background will be applied to the active page in your book and it’ll be added to your Backgrounds gallery. (Before long it’ll be possible to choose and add several backgrounds at once.)
Use our feedback form or leave a comment on this post to let us know what kind of backgrounds you’d like to see us add, and we’ll send you a t-shirt to thank you for your suggestion.
Inspired by Charlotte’s autofill post a few weeks ago, I have become an autofilling fiend. Give me a picture and I’ll have it in a book lickity-split. The nice thing about autofill is that it frees you up to do a lot more with your time all while building drop-dead gorgeous photo books. To commemorate my enthusiasm for Autofill, I created a comic that walks you through how to use Autofill. Check it out Here.
Autofill, Baby.
Or, in the same time that it takes you to read a short comic, you could have your own autofill book.
Picture this: A loved one has a birthday this month. You want to give something special because, seriously, if you give one more picture
frame or other knick-knack you’re going to be branded as an unimaginative gift giver. A gift you make yourself would be great, but between work, the kids’activities, and your own Bunco group, you don’t have a lot of time to make something. What to do; what to do?
We have an answer: Autofill a photo book with Inkubook. Autofill is a new feature of Inkubook that lets you pick your photos and make a book without spending tons of time building the pages yourself. Autofilled
books are available in our very popular 11″ x 8.5″ Classic Landscape style. (Down the road, we’ll expand the selection so that you can also make our other styles using the Autofill tool.)
How It’s Done
Here’s a breakdown of how Autofill works:
First, you start a new book project. When you do, you get to choose whether to use Autofill or to make your book from scratch. Choose Autofill My Book.
Select Autofill when starting a new book.
Then we’ll ask you a bit of basic information, such as what you’d like to call the project and whether that name should be on the cover. When that’s done, you’ll get to pick the theme of your book, which determines which starter set of backgrounds your book will include.
Select the theme you would like.
The last thing you have to do to help us complete your book is choose the photos that are going in it. Choose from your own computer or pull some in from Flickr. Can you imagine how easy it is to make a book when all you have to do is tell Flickr to let Inkubook have access to your photos? Right now, we even have a promotion available to Flickr members that entitles you to a free book!
Get images from your computer or from Flickr.
Regardless of whether you pick photos from your computer or from Flickr, we’ll put your book together just as fast as we can. Most of the time it takes to build the book is time spent pulling the files from the original storage location. The more photos you choose for your book, the longer that process takes. Once we have those photos, building the pages is a quick process. If you use a lot of photos, you can work on something else on your computer or walk away for a little while. You don’t have to sit and twiddle your thumbs while the Autofill magic happens. You just have to make sure to leave the page that has Inkubook working in it open so that we can go about our business.
After we’re done making your book, we suggest that you preview it to see how you like what we’ve done. You’re also free to go in and make any changes you’d like. You can add backgrounds, swap the order of photos, or even switch up the layouts. If you’re satisfied with what you see in the preview, you can call it done and place your order. Either way, you’ll have a book that didn’t cost you hours and hours to create.
What You Should Know
Autofill is almost so easy that you could do it while standing on your head, but we have a few suggestions that might help you with your Autofill experience.
If the order the photos appear in your book is important to you, you can try to organize them appropriately before uploading them from your computer. Do this by copying all the photos to one folder and putting numbers at the beginning of the filenames. The numbers should follow the order that you want the pictures to appear. If you have a total of 97 pictures, the first one should have a prefix of 01 and the last will have a prefix of 97.
If you’re using Flickr, create a new set that holds only the photos you’re going to use in the book. As Kit mentioned in an earlier post, photos are imported from Flickr in the order that you uploaded them in the first place—with some variation that’s created by the sizes of the files. If they’re put in the book out of order, you can move them around after the building process is complete.
We use a variety of layouts in Autofill, so each page of your book won’t be exactly identical to every other page. Some pages will have one photo, some will have two, and some will have four. It all depends on how many photos you have and how we think they’ll best be arranged. If you don’t like what we’ve come up with, you can do some editing after the book is built. Here’s an example spread from an Autofill book I made:
This week at Inkubook, we’re celebrating Flickr and all of the sweet functionality they bring to to the process of building your Inkubook. To commemorate the occasion, we’re extending a Free Book Offer to Flickr members. To find out all of the details visit our special Flickr page on Inkubook.com.
Personally, I think that Flickr and Inkubook make a pretty heroic combination, so much so that I was inspired to build a little comic to walk you through the process of getting your photos from Flickr in to your drop-dead gorgeous photo book.
When we first launched Inkubook, we started with a pretty basic palette of backgrounds. We had white, of course, but if you wanted to gussy up your pages with a little bit of color or creativity, your choices were limited to a rainbow of pastels or a creation of your own design (done in Photoshop or some other graphics program).
One of our first goals in making improvements to the site was to add a greater variety of backgrounds. We’re proud to say that we now have more than 200 backgrounds to choose from, and we’re working on adding more all the time!
Today we’d like to draw your attention to our collection of wedding-themed backgrounds. This isn’t to say that you couldn’t use any one of our backgrounds in your wedding book. For example, if you’re having a beach wedding you might prefer to use the backgrounds with the sandy white seashells or the festive flip-flops instead of the backgrounds that we’ve deemed “wedding-like.” But if you need a starting place, we have these two background families ready for you.
First is the Classic Wedding collection. When we look at these backgrounds, we think of romantic, traditional weddings that proceed to the accompaniment of string quartets. Have a look.
The Classic Wedding background swatches. (Click the image to make it larger.)
Don’t you feel like you should be watching the bride and her father swirl around the dance floor while you enjoy a few pillow mints with your luscious piece of cake and glass of champagne?
If that’s a little too traditional and staid for your style, we also have a collection that we call Modern Wedding. It’s every bit as pretty as the Classic Wedding collection, but it has a different appeal.
The Modern Wedding background swatches. (Click the image to make it larger.)
Among the backgrounds in both collections you’ll see a page to use for signatures in a guest book. If you’d like some ideas for what you might do when creating your own guest book, check out Inspiration: Make a Customized Guest Book.
A page from a sample wedding book.
It’s a little bit hard to imagine the full effect of the backgrounds from these little swatches, so if you’d like to see them in action on some pages of a wedding book, have a look at this PDF.
We keep a running list of backgrounds we’d like to add in the future, and we’d be very interested to hear what types of wedding backgrounds you’d like to have available for your wedding book. You can use our Feedback form to shoot us an email with your ideas.
It is inevitable. You have the ideal picture for your Inkubook, but the subject is a bit off center, there is a little too much background, or maybe you’d like to cut Cousin Rudy out altogether. After all, nothing is ever really perfect. Luckily, Inkubook has a handful of tools that allow you to make basic modifications to your images right in your book. We aren’t trying to duplicate Photoshop™ here; we’re just trying to help you make drop-dead gorgeous books.
You can access the photo-editing tools simply by clicking on any image from within the editor. A set of tools will appear at the top of the screen. At any time, you can switch images with a single click.
The first set of tools on the left of the bar allow you to reposition the image within the photo box. You can move the image up, down, left, or right within the box. The fifth button with all four arrows allows you to re-center the image within the box. That comes in handy when you’ve nudged your photo too much in one direction and you think, “Dang, that’s not going to work. I’d better start over.”
The next set of controls consists of two buttons that allow you to rotate the image within the photo box. The left button rotates 90° clockwise and the right button rotates 90° degrees counter-clockwise. Why ever would you want to rotate a photo? Well, sometimes photos come off your camera with the image lying on its side. If you make the artistic decision to leave Great-Aunt Lucille lying on her right side, we respect that. She might find it mildly offensive, though, so if you want to ensure that you continue to get that $5.00 check for your birthday, you can rotate the picture so she’s upright again.
Next are a pair of buttons with magnifying glasses on them. These allow you to resize the image. The left button will make the image smaller until the entire image appears within the photo box. For example, if you put a landscape photo in a box that’s oriented for a portrait picture, you can shrink your landscape until it spans the width of the box. (This will leave some blank space at the top and bottom of your photo box.) The right button allows you to zoom in on the image, making the visible portion larger. This can help eliminate some unwanted background and make the focal point of the photo more prominent. Take note: When enlarging a photo, it is possible to make the image so large that it will be of poor quality when printed. We warn you when you’re in danger of this happening by displaying an error icon on the image. If you see the error on one of your photos, you can scale the image back down using the left (-) resize button.
Finally, there is a trash can on the far right of the image editing toolbar. It probably won’t surprise you to find out that clicking this button will remove the current image from its photo box. By deleting the photo, you’ve returned the photo box to its original state and the background will be visible behind it in the preview screen and the printed book. (The outline of an empty photo box or text box doesn’t print in the book, so leaving one empty is like pretending it was never there at all.) At any time, you can drag another image into this box.
The image editing tools allow you to make those last-minute tweaks to make an image more perfect within your Inkubook. While we can’t get Cousin Rudy out of your life altogether, we can at least help you squeeze him out of the picture.
