Coffee Table Book

Rhonda's Photo Book

Several years ago my oldest daughter and I, collected many precious family photos and put together a family photo book. Pages were organized by events, vacations, holidays, and were chronological - Many hours of work. Everyone got a copy as a Christmas gift that year. I encourage you to do that. My mother passed away before I became a teen and many of my memories are forged in a wonderful family album she kept. My grandmother continued the scrapbook and I am so pleased she did. My collective precious memories.  

I collected together about 10 years ago a “Rhonda” book.  Not exactly a coffee table book but relevant to the emerging Rhonda. It has early photos, writings and is peppered with cross-dressing cartoons. Something the kids, I hope, will get a kick-out-of  someday as they remember “dear-old-dad”.  

That hard cover photo book I put together myself, from inkjet printed pages and it is held together by a spring-loaded spine. I used Microsoft Publisher to do the pages and the book kit was marketed by HP (to sell photo paper). It can still be found on eBay. It looks good, professional and I made a wood slip box for it. The hard cover has a window where I positioned a portrait photo page and in the slip cover box I made a corresponding window. It was fun to do.  

Google's Photo Book

Apple offers a photo book service as part of iPhoto, although I believe to use this service, you must have a Mac. Walgreen's (pharmacy chain) also provides this service. My reason for bringing this up today is that Google now offers a new Photo Book service. It looks like you upload your photos to “Google Photo”,a great cloud storage solution, then organize. $19.95 for a 20 page hard cover book. A great deal and you have some creative tools available to build/crop/organize your photos.  You can have more than 20 pages. 

Oh, do not have any photos. Who are you kidding - Likely every event and every outfit tried on before the event is documented somewhere. Curate your own collection of photos and document your progress; your early outings (deer in the headlight look), those 90’s shoulder pads and that great red wig. When done - put it on the coffee table.

Page from My Photo Book