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 code FREECARDS during 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.

It’s too late to make a photo book for mom but it’s not too late to order her an Inkubook gift card. Photo book gift cards make great gifts for moms who love to make digital scrapbooks & photo books. Just order online and you can have it sent electronically or print it out and put it in a card. It doesn’t get much easier than that. 

Check it out: http://inkubook.com/gift_cards/default.aspx

You’ve worked hard for your money and we think you deserve to keep more of it. So, for a limited time, regardless of income, everyone qualifies for the 28% photo book savings bracket at Inkubook. All you have to do is make a drop-dead gorgeous photo book or online digital scrapbook and order by Friday, April 17, 2009. That’s it. No complicated forms to fill out. No receipts to dig up. We’ll even let you order up to ten copies of your book at the discounted price. Now that’s a sweet deduction.

Just enter coupon code INKUTAX09 during checkout to claim your deduction. You deserve it.

Note: Offer cannot be combined with any other offer or promotion. Coupon may be used one time per customer for up to ten copies of the same book. You may not file an extension to get the 28% discount past the April 17, 2009, deadline.

Spring might not have officially sprung yet, but it’s not far off. Soon it will be time for gardening, soccer, baseball, Mother’s Day and graduation parties – all fantastic photo book-worthy occasions. At Inkubook, we’ve been busy getting ready for the spring photo book season by making several improvements, including enhancements like deleting photos from your photo gallery, working with text in your photo book, new photo book backgrounds & layouts and more.

To help launch you into spring, Inkubook has a sweet BOGO offer to share with you: Buy one photo book of any size or page count and get a second copy of the same photo book free!  With savings of up to $69.95, now is a great time to make a drop-dead gorgeous photo book. Make one as a gift and keep one for yourself!

Don’t miss out. This offer ends St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 2009. Just enter coupon code SPRINGBOGO during checkout to save some serious green! Offer cannot be combined with any other offer or promotion. Coupon code may be used one time per customer for one photo book.

Enhance your rugged travel photos with the
backgrounds from the Outdoor Adventure theme.

If you like outdoor activities like hiking, mountain biking, camping or fishing, you’re probably really looking forward to spring about now. It’s the time of year when the boat, sport and travel shows come to town and we’ve all had enough of the cold. As you gear up for spring it might just be the perfect time to break out the photos from last year’s camping trip and make a great travel and adventure themed photo book.

When we first started creating themes and collections of backgrounds for Inkubooks, we thought we had all our bases covered. We had a variety of family themes, kid themes, and travel themes, not to mention the more practical themes such as cookbook, business book, and portfolio. Then someone on the Inkubook team said, “Where’s the manly outdoors theme? You know…the one for people who like to hike and camp and stuff like that?” That’s when we realized that we’d overlooked the outdoor enthusiasts in the crowd, and we decided we’d better correct that situation PDQ.

Swatches from the Outdoor Adventure Theme

Hence the Outdoor Adventure theme was born. All of the backgrounds in this collection are clean and simple, so your photos can do the talking. This theme is inspired by the types of trail signs you might see in a state or national park and the color scheme runs toward the colors you’d find when shopping for gear at an outdoor outfitter: foresty green, earthy sand, and fiery orange (although it’s not quite fiery enough to be called blaze orange).

If your vacations and weekend getaways are about roughing it with a tent, an outdoor shower, and a camp stove instead of a down comforter, a whirlpool garden tub, and a five-star restaurant, this theme is for you. Look for it in the Travel category when you start a new book. (And if you prefer a more luxurious vacation, you might want to check into our other travel themes.)

Click here to print
a copy of the coupon.

If you’re already an Inkubook member you may have received this offer in an email recently. If not, now is an excellent time to create a free account. If you love making photo books but also want to save some money, Inkubook is offering free shipping until February 28, 2009. Free shipping is the perfect reason to take advantage of the lull between holiday festivities and the start of spring activities by making a book with photos from the winter season or working on a gift book for later in the year. (Don’t forget: Mother’s Day will be here before you know it.)

To take advantage of this offer enter coupon code LUVFREESHIP at checkout. Offer good for free ground shipping to U.S. addresses on your entire order. Coupon cannot be combined with any other offer. Limit one use per customer.

Today Inkubook announced a partnership to become the official photo book provider of the NFL Alumni, Inc. Indianapolis Chapter. Under the agreement, Alumni members, family and friends will use Inkubook to create photo books commemorating special events, including the organization’s charitable golf tournament. These photo books will be made available for sale to benefit the chapter’s mission “Caring for Kids.”

NFL Alumni Indy Chapter captures the memories of the
2008 Charity Golf Classic in a gorgeous
Ultimate Portrait Inkubook photo book.

“We look forward to working with Inkubook to capture the memories of our events in photo book keepsakes that will help us raise money for some great charities including the Super Bowl XLVI Legacy Fund, Tony Dungy’s All-Pro Dad and Peyton Manning’s Peyback Foundation,” said Barry Krauss, president of the Indianapolis Chapter of NFL Alumni, Inc.

“We’re pleased to add the NFL Alumni, Inc. Indy Chapter to our inaugural group of partners,” said Inkubook General Manager Ken Kratz. “The collaborative nature of Inkubook, as well as our flexible partnership program, makes it the perfect option for any organization that relies on group events to drive fundraising.”

You don’t even have to be a former pro football player to join the team. If you would like to make a gorgeous photo book and help out the NFL Alumni, Inc. Indy Chapter in its mission of “Caring for Kids” at the same time visit http://inkubook.com/NFL-Alumni-Indy to learn more.

Well, it’s here, that part of winter that’s blisteringly cold and inhospitable. The time of year when it seems like going outdoors should be outlawed. One day the temperatures might be relatively mild, but the next is outrageously frigid. This is the type of weather that’s best for staying warm with a nice indoor activity.

Snow day memories can last forever in a gorgeous
winter-themed Inkubook photo book.

Call us predictable, but we’re going to give you a suggestion for an indoor activity, and you can probably guess what it is. When you’re snowbound (or just trapped inside because it’s significantly below freezing outside), it’s a good time to work on a photo book. With our collections of Winter and Contemporary Christmas backgrounds, you can pretend to be enjoying the seasonably cold temperatures without actually setting foot outside.

It’s a perfect time to organize your photos from the holidays and put them in a photo book adorned with our Contemporary Christmas backgrounds. As you can see from the swatches, the Contemporary Christmas theme says Christmas, but it does it by updating the look of traditional pine green and candy-cane red. The green is a little more muted and the red has more of a cranberry hue. Trees and ornaments have modern shapes and designs. If you prefer something a little more traditional, we still have the regular Christmas theme that includes more classic colors and patterns.

Inkubook Contemporary Christmas Theme

While it might be too cold to go sledding, ice skating, or snowman-building right now, it’s a good time to remember the last winter adventure you had by building a book with some frosty backgrounds. Designed with images and colors that evoke memories clear, crisp days full of sunshine and snow, the Winter theme looks adorable when framing photos of people joyously playing in the snow.

Inkubook Winter Theme

If the last thing you want to do is be faced with the imagery that makes you think of winter, don’t fear. We still have all the backgrounds that are reminiscent of warmer time, such as the Summer and Family Beach Vacation themes. You can turn your heat up to 88, put on a pair of shorts, sip a refreshing glass of iced tea, and focus on the history of last summer instead of the history of last month.

Holiday season 2008 is in the near distant past, but that doesn’t mean it’s too early to start thinking about what kind of special gift you might make for someone in 2009. In case you haven’t already thought about taking all your old traditional photos and putting them into a photo book, or in case you think it would be too difficult, it might be time for you to think about it a little more. Inkubook member Dick Fey made three books for his children and wrote us to say how pleased he was with them, so we asked Dick if he’d let us tell everyone a little about his experiences with Inkubook.

Dick is a semi-retired business ownder from Leawood, Kansas, which is a suburb of Kansas City. His plan had been to make DVD videos of old 8mm film for his children as a Christmas present. He sent many rolls of 30-year-old film to a company for professional transfer to digital format, and he also scanned lots of pictures himself. Then he made a video slide show and put it on DVDs. Once he got that part done he thought he was finished with his gift. Then he found Inkubook. Here’s what he had to say:

“I’d never heard of you, but your website looked interesting, so I decided to play with it a little. It was perfect timing, since I already had all the pictures readily available. I thought that perhaps having a ‘coffee table book’ of the pictures would be a perfect addition to the gift pack. I’d never made a picture book before–in fact I didn’t even know the technology existed. I found the website very easy to comprehend and use, and had a good time doing it.

Dick Fey and his children with their books.

“Initially I was concerned about quality; buying over the Internet when you can’t actually touch or feel the product is difficult, at least for me. I was pleasantly surprised when I began to receive the books. They were better than I had expected. Even pictures that Inkubook had marked as questionable came out OK.

“We gave our children the books for Christmas, and, boy, were they thrilled! I think the immediate gratification of the photo book was even more important to them than the videos.”

So whether you’re in the market for a good mid-winter activity to keep you busy or you want to get started on a present for holiday season 2009, think about scanning some of those old photos and putting them in a modern and attractive photo book. Dick Fey is happy he did, and you will be, too.

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.