I've been playing catch up recently. When we moved to Kansas City at the turn of the Millennium (just had to use that phrase!) one thing that got set aside was keeping our family photo albums up to date. So that was a project I took on over one weekend recently.

My wife and I started dating in 1984, and have a photo album for every year since then. When we moved at the end of 1999, we kept taking snapshots, but they went into a drawer instead of an album. Then in late 2001, I got a point-and-shoot digital and stopped using film. Last year I started making photo books for each year since then instead of making small prints and putting them in an album. Now it was time to get those old prints sorted and albummed (is that even a word?).

What surprised me was that it took as long to go through a year's worth of snapshots and add them to an album as it takes to create a book digitally. Once I got 2000 and most of 2001 moved into albums, I sat down to create two more albums for more recent years. I used MyPublisher.com and Blurb.com to do books for 2004 and 2005. Each company has an application you can download (for both Windows and Mac) that you use to put the book together. And they're fairly simple to use.

I found Blurb's software to be a little less flexible in building the book (fewer layout options I liked). MyPublisher had more to offer in that area. However, MyPublisher was more expensive. Now I've sent them both off for printing, and when I get the finished books, I'll see which looks best, then do 2006 and 2007. And then I'll be caught up for the first time in nine years. Until, that is, the first of next year...

Note: Both books have now arrived, and the quality of each is very good.