The fall season is almost here and for many of us, that means football, tailgating and good times with family and friends. We’re celebrating the start of the new season with all new book sizes and cover styles. We’ve bolstered our photobook lineup with the 7×5 Mini Brag in hardcover and softcover styles starting at just $9.95. Plus, you can now make the 8.5×8.5 Simple Square in hardcover and the 8.5×11 Ultimate Portrait in softcover. Have you already made a Simple Square softcover or Ultimate Portrait hardcover and want to change to one of the new cover styles? Just select the “Copy Book” link while signed-in on your Inkubook member homepage and we will give you the option to change the cover with a single click.

Order any book, whether it’s one of the new rookies or one of our old veterans, by Sunday, September 27, 2009 and enjoy free standard ground shipping to U.S. addresses (or $8.99 off any other shipping method). Just enter code KICKOFF09 during checkout. (Code may be used once per customer. Not valid with any other offer or promotion).

So get started today. It’s always free to join and get creative with Inkubook. You only pay for printed photo books.

For those of you who have been pregnant or have lived with someone pregnant, you’re likely aware of the “nesting instinct” that sets in just before baby arrives. This instinct causes many women to make cleaning, shopping and organizing top priorities. At 39 weeks pregnant, I had cleaned everything, bought all that I could, and organized and reorganized every nook and cranny in the house. When there was nothing left to do, I came up with something … getting a jump-start on baby’s first photo book.

Baby photo books made at Inkubook are printed on 100 lb. archival-quality
silk paper, which means they will stand up to years of enjoyment.

When my first daughter was born two years ago, I made a baby photo book  outlining our trip to the hospital, her birth, our time at the hospital, her first car ride and the first 72 hours at home, including her first bath on the kitchen counter. I finally got around to making that book when she was about 8 months old. I wish I had made that photo book sooner, when the events were fresher in my sleep-deprived mind.

This time would be different. This time, I had experience and a little inspiration from Laura, the professional organizer, mom of three and blogger of OrgJunkie on my side. Having made a baby photo book like this before, I already knew what sort of pictures I wanted to include. So, I logged on to Inkubook.com, and started the Simple Square baby photo book. The 8.5 square soft cover book fits nicely on a bookshelf and coffee table and in the diaper bag. I chose the Baby’s 1st Year theme. And in my super-organization state-of-mind, I began to lay out the photo book and write in some of the text I know I’ll want.

Photos you might want to include in your baby photo book:
- Mommy’s belly before and at hospital
- Cord cutting, hospital bath, bracelet
- Mommy, daddy, sibling, grandparents w/baby
- “Birth day” cake
- Car ride home
- First 72 hours at home – feeding, changing, napping, bath

After baby girl arrives and is finally taking a nap longer than 20 minutes, I’ll be able to upload all of the photos and place them in the book, share it with family and friends through Inkubook’s Invite Friends feature and order the photo book before she wakes for her next feeding. How’s that for organized?

Things are going well with our upgrade to Microsoft Silverlight 2, and the best part is that we don’t expect our service to be interrupted today. The site is still functioning on the beta 2 version of Silverlight.

So what’s that mean, exactly? For most people who’ve not had a reason to download the new version of Silverlight, it means business as usual for making your books. You can sign in and get to work as you would on any other day.

For go-getters who’ve already downloaded and installed Silverlight 2, Inkubook won’t work for you at the moment unless you take matters into your own hands. The solution is to uninstall Silverlight 2 then visit http://inkubook.com where you’ll be prompted to install the beta version Silverlight. From that point, you can work on your book again. The alternative solution is to wait until we have Silverlight 2 installed, which will make everything function harmoniously for you.

We currently have Silverlight 2 running in our testing environment so we can make sure there are no kinks in it before we put it out there for you to use. We expect to complete the upgrade around 6:00 a.m. EST on Friday morning. At that time there will be an interruption to our service that we expect to be short. Check back here occasionally to learn if we’ve had to change our schedule.

If you’re having any problems with the site that don’t seem to be related to this issue, please email admin@inkubook.com and lend a hand.

On Tuesday sometime after 8:00 a.m. EST we’ll be upgrading to the newest version of Microsoft Silverlight 2. This upgrade will give you a better Inkubook experience when it’s complete.

We’re not exactly certain when Microsoft will give us the go ahead to make the change, nor do we know exactly how many hours it will take. Throughout the day we’re going to keep our blog updated with the latest and greatest information we have, so visit frequently to find out when we expect to be back to wearing our book-making hats.

Any orders that are placed before the upgrade begins will still be processed according to our normal production schedule. You can expect to receive your book or books as planned (2-6 business days for printing plus the appropriate number of days for your chosen shipping method).

Thank you for your patience as we continue to make Inkubook better for you!
 

Yesterday’s post explained how to get photos from your Flickr account into the Inkubook editing space. Today, I want to explore what can be done with Flickr in advance to save a little time in the creation process and to make everything run a little more smoothly.

Use Sets

Adding Photos to Sets in Flickr

Sets in Flickr allow you to group photos into virtual albums. Unlike real world albums, you can put individual photos into multiple sets. Prior to building your Inkubook, it would not be a bad idea to create a new set specifically for the book. Then you can then go and grab all of the photos in one fell swoop.

Rotate Your Photos

While Inkubook allows you to rotate your photos, it is within the context of your book and can only be done to one photo at a time. We are working on adding additional functionality here, but in the meantime there is always Flickr. If you have a lot of photos that need to be rotated, Flickr allows you to do so en masse via their Batch Organize tool. Simply drag the images into the editing pane and select “Rotate” from the “Edit photos” menu.

Edit Your Photos

Editing Photos in Flickr with Picnik

In a previous post, I had mentioned one of my new favorite image editing tools Picnik. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Flickr and Picnik have partnered to provide image editing services to Flickr members. To access the tool, simply select an image and click on the “Edit Photo” icon above it. You’ll be taken to an editing screen with all of your favorite Picnik tools. These include the basics of rotate, crop, resize, exposure, colors, sharpen, red-eye reduction, and auto-fix in addition to the rich Create toolset that allows for all kinds of powerful effects (see here for more details). Upon saving, the updated image is added to your Flickr photostream.

Name Your Photos

While we try to make it as easy as possible to identify your photos in Inkubook, there are some things that are really hard to see – the perennial “Is Kit making a stupid face?” question, for example. There is no easier way to identify a photo than with a good descriptive title. Be sure to add titles in Flickr prior to importing photos into Inkubook to avoid searching for that one good shot.

Other Important Stuff to Know

Import Order

Flickr exports photos to Inkubook in the order that they were loaded into Flickr. Any organizing and reordering that you do on Flickr will not have any affect on this. Import order is also affected by the sizes of photos, such that when Flickr exports a really big photo at the same time as a really small photo, the smaller photo is going to move a little quicker and is going to show up in your Inkubook photo collection first.
The largest impact here is going to be on the new Inkubook Autofill feature (a topic that we’ll touch on in a future post). The happy coincidence is that Autofill is great at grouping photos, and importng them from Flickr in the order they were photographed makes this even better.

The Benefit of Being a Pro

Finally, there are benefits to being a Pro. At Flickr, that means, in addition to all of the other pluses, that Inkubook can import your full size image, which will work in virtually all of our photo templates. For those who are not Pro members, we are only able to access the large size, which is a 1024 pixels wide, and may cause a few of those annoying low resolution alerts to appear.

Flickr and Inkubook are pretty much a match made in heaven. With a little forethought, you can use some of the tools and resources within Flickr to make the process of building your photo book all that much easier.

Silverlight Showcase Ratings Page

Inkubook is built with a cool new tool from Microsoft Corporation called Silverlight. In Microsoft’s own words, Silverlight is

“…a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.”

That sounds a little boring, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not just for computer geeks. Silverlight helps everybody (you, me, and even technically challenged people like my mom) have a great experience on the Web. In fact, you might have heard about it during the Olympics because Silverlight was used to manage the streaming video coverage of the games. If you watched any of Michael Phelps’s record-breaking swim action on the NBC site, you were very likely using Silverlight and you might not even have known it. Aside from the initial request you’ll get to download it to your computer–which is much like the requests you receive the first time you use any sort of plug-in–you’ll never even know Silverlight is working behind the scenes.

Right now, Inkubook is being featured in the Silverlight showcase. We’re even getting top billing, which has us pleased as punch. Silverlight encourages people to check out the websites that use the technology, and individuals can give ratings to the sites in the showcase. We’d certainly appreciate it if you’d pay the Showcase a visit and give us a good rating. It’ll send us into the weekend with a smile.

Inkubook’s being featured on the Silverlight home page.

At Inkubook, we strive to give you all the tools to build a gorgeous book with as little effort as possible and sometimes that means helping you tweak your photos a little. So we included our photo toolbar that helps you do things like nudge photos around in a photo box or rotate them. However, the Inkubook tools won’t replace desktop image-manipulation programs like Adobe Phtoshop™, and sometimes your photos need the love that only sophisticated graphic programs can give.

The downside to most advanced image-editing programs is that they can cost hundreds of dollars. In the interest of helping you get the most bang for your buck, we will from time to time bring tools to your attention that can give you a lot of results for not a lot of moolah.

When the goal is keeping money in your wallet, you can’t do much better than free, and it just so happens that we know of a program that meets fits the bill. GIMP (or the GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free, community-built program that strives to match Photoshop feature-for-feature. You can get it for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, here.

You’ll be astounded by just how powerful this application is. It can help you execute just abut any modification to an image that you would like, such as reducing red-eye, removing unneeded details (like ol’ Cousin Rudy), and fixing perspective distortion, and those things just scratch the surface.

When you have some time to play around, give it a try. For some users, it may be a little advanced and have a steep learning curve, but if you have a little patience and an adventurous spirit, it’s worth your while to give it a shot.

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.

I mentioned previously that we held a friends and family contest prior to opening Inkubook to the general public. We had a number of outstanding entries, but one stood out amongst the crowd as being especially creative. It was a surprise in that it was a unique use of Inkubook and a very polished work.

The book, titled Aibi and Olive and the Cheddar Cheese Moon, is a children’s story that employs original artwork by Sarah Takhashi along with an endearing text by Zoe Ragland. It tells the tale of an adventurous girl, Aibi, who shoots down a moon of delectable cheese and strives to return it to the sky with the help (or hindrance) of her voracious feline, Olive. The result is elegant yet simple. It showcases the power of Inkubook. Something as basic as a bedtime story for your children can be turned into a beautiful and professional book that can be passed amongst friends and even through generations.

Aibi and Olive and the Cheddar Cheese Moon

by Zoe Ragland and Sarah Takahashi

Start your own Little Ones Book at Inkubook.

Prior to launching Inkubook, we held a contest for our friends and family to give them the chance to come and check out the site and provide us with feedback. Our second-place winner Brian B. is an event producer in Indianapolis. His book was a commemorative of his daughter Emerson’s first 26 months and excelled in aesthetics and creativity. We took a few minutes to chat with Brian and get his thoughts behind the book and his inspiration.

Q. Tell us about the book.
A. The book is 26 pages featuring one page for each of the months my daughter has been alive. Each page uses a photo from that month of her life. Page one is the first day of her life with the song title “First Day of My Life” by Bright Eyes. On page two she is two months and so forth. A calendar across the bottom of the page identifies the month. Each page then has a caption that matches the photo that also happens to be a song title. I made an accompanying CD with each of the songs.

Q. Did you use any tools outside of Inkubook in the creation process?
A. I did. I used Photoshop to make the calendar banner across each photo and to place the text. Inkubook offers text, but doesn’t yet offer the font that I always use when I make something about my daughter. I call it “her” font. I then uploaded each of the images to my book and chose the full-page full-bleed template.

Q. What was your inspiration for this book?
A. It was my mother’s birthday and she doesn’t live close, so she doesn’t often get to see my daughter. I felt this was the perfect way for her to “be there” for all the stages she missed. My mom is sappy and very much into photos of her grandkids and into music, so I thought the combination would be a slam dunk.

Q. And was it?
A. It was. She cried and cried the day it came. She called the entire family to tell them about the book and CD. I’m probably going to have to order a second copy, as she will wear it out.

Q. Will you make another book?
A. Christmas is just around the corner…

Book For Grandma Sherri
Designed & Built by Brian B.

Make Your Own Baby’s First Year Inkubook