Different Pictures

Last week I resolved to not work on biology or memory work at all, and we also did no school whatsoever.  Instead, I worked on a few things of my own!  One thing I actually got accomplished was the Rivendell yearbook for this past year.  I had grand ideas of using Photoshop for a few pictures, and indeed I started playing around with it.  But then I realized that was actually stressing me out, since it was taking forever, and I wasn't quite getting the effect I was looking for.  And I definitely didn't have forever to finish this little project, so . . . I put all those creative thoughts out of my brain, and just tried to get it done.

Last year I used blurb.com, which I was happy with, once I got it all figured out.  The only downside is that when you are dealing with a lot of pictures, you can't do the book online.  You have to download their software and just work on one computer.  That is fine when it's just me, but the plan is that next year I pass this off to the boys, so they can put "yearbook staff" or whatever down for extracurricular activities!  So we need something where people can work from different computers.  That led me to Shutterfly.  It was . . . okay.  Blurb was a better fit for yearbooks, I think.  Or maybe I just didn't spend enough time on Shutterfly.  I finally was able to manipulate the sizes of pictures and text boxes, but it wasn't that easy or intuitive, and it was often not exactly what I wanted.  It was okay, though.  And some of the layouts looked fine there on the side, but when I picked them for my page, the layout would have weird elements show up, like a giant brown picture frame around one picture that totally distracted from everything else, or a piece of "scotch tape" at the top of pictures.  Weird!  There was no way I could figure out to get rid of the extra stuff, so I never picked those layouts, even though they were good ones.  My biggest issue with Shutterfly is that loading my book one time made my desk top freeze up, and after that, I could never load the crazy thing on there!  It was really inconvenient because that's where all my pictures are.  I had to put them all on a portable hard drive (yes, yes, something I would have done at some point anyway--I just didn't want to have to do it right then!) and use a laptop. 

But the book is done, thanks to some last-minute help with the verbiage from Isaac and Caleb McC.  I totally should have done thing back in June, when Nathan and Luke were around!  It's hard to write captions about events where you were not present, LOL.  But Isaac and Caleb came through, and now we're just waiting to see the final product.  I love having all the memories of the co-op year in a book!  It's so fun to look back through last year's book, and we didn't even really know we were going to do a yearbook, so there weren't as many pictures to choose from!