An Instagram Photo Book ~ The Perfect Gift

I love giving great gifts. I usually rack my brain trying to come up with the perfect gift for family and friends. For the most part I give good gifts; I desire to give great gifts. For years I have made photo books and calendars for my mom and mother-in-law for Christmas. The one year I didn't make the calendar I heard about it all year. My mom was completely lost for 12 months. It made me realize that she really loves that gift. She will get a calendar every year from now on!

When my kiddos were invited to a birthday party for a friend in my son's 7th grade class, I had just listened to the awesome ScrapGals podcast all about selfies. A few days later while browsing Michael's with my daughter, it hit me! An Instagram selfie album would be the perfect give for a 13 year old girl! I found this little 4x4 Becky Higgins two ring binder at Hobby Lobby (because Michael's didn't have it.)

 

The album was a huge hit! I'm not sure who was more excited, her receiving the gift or me giving it. The album I'm showing in this blog post is actually the second Instagram album I have made. When I saw how much everyone loved the first one, I decided to make one for my dear friend's daughter 'just because.' After all, sometimes the best gifts are the 'just because' ones. I can't wait to see her face when I hand it to her. :)

The book contains about 40 4x4 photos, no words, no embelishments, just photos. I used most of her photos from the past year, but not all. The cool thing is there is plenty of room to add more photos if she wants.

Let's talk about how I printed the pictures. I print most of my pictures at home using my Canon Pixma MG6320 and thought that would be easiest for this project. After taking screen shots of all the Instagram photos and a few failed attempts at printing directly from my camera roll (you will get 4x4's enlarged onto 4x6 photo paper.)  I tried using the Becky Higgins Project Life app; this would work if you want to print a 4x4 pic with 2, 2x2's on 4x6 photo paper, but that's not what I needed for this project. So...after taking the screen shot, I used the Diptic app and put the photos in the 4x4 template with a little white border. Next, I exported the photo to my camera roll and emailed it to myself. The last step was opening 4 photos at a time into Photoshop onto an 8.5x11 canvas, resizing and printing.

This little book turned out just as fabulous as the first one! Hey, there I am on the right ~ We love getting all the girls together for pedicures!

For the last page I took a screen shot of her Instagram cover page. Neat little capture of how many followers she has and how many she is following. I love her motto ~ It's really okay if you don't like me, not everyone has good taste.

In this day and age printed photos are rare. Our photos are being kept behind screens instead of in our hands where they should be.  So make someone's day (or year) and share some printed photos ~ they will love it, I promise!