I love Instagram; the whole concept of taking a photo and sharing it with friends and family, or like-minded people, is really appealing to me. It's a great social media platform with a huge audience, and the people I follow are made up of friends, bloggers, pure Instagrammers (no blogs), or complete strangers on the other side of the world with an amazing photographic library. And that's the thing about Instagram, the people who use it do so for different reasons; to share their artwork, their stories or the precious moments during the day.
Basically for me it's like a 365 project but with more opportunity to record our lives.
Over the past few months, I've seen quite a few bloggers share the various ways they've found of getting their virtual photos actually into their hands in real life. Some come in the format of fridge magnets, some are posters, some are individual Polaroid style photographs. All of these are fine and dandy, but to me it means I then have to find somewhere to put them; the fridge is reserved for The Boy's paintings, a poster doesn't appeal to me, and I have more small photographs than I know what to do with. I've still got prints from photoshoots when The Boy was a year old to do something with. I certainly don't want more loose photos.
About a month ago, I had a 'like' on one of my photos from a company called Printrgram. They have since had to change their name as Instagram have issued new rules, and are now called Printrbook.
I digress.
Printrbook is a third party service (not associated with Instagram in any way) which allows users to create photobooks of their Instagram photos. It is incredibly easy to use;
- sign in using your Instagram login details, select either 25 or 50 photos (same amount of pages, just printed on one side or both sides of each page),
- edit the front cover and whether dates or captions are required on each page,
- preview,
- pay £10.00 plus £2.00 p&p.
The books measure 10cmx10cm and the pages are 150gsm Inaset paper while the cover is 300gsm Trucard. The paper used is FSC certified, produced using power from 100% renewable resources and Printrbook have a carbon free status by offsetting all site emissions through the charity Rainforest Concern.
And I'm very, very impressed with the quality of the book.
I've selected three photos for the bottom row which show off the quality of the printing (click here, here or here to see the original Instagram images), which I think is very good considering Instagram only stores them as 612×612 pixels resolution. I also like the fact that they aren't glossy, but have a soft sheen to the paper.
The books cost £10.00 with £2.00 postage and packaging. I think that's actually really good value for money, especially when an equivalent book from one of the main online photo stores would cost well over £15.00, and need the photos uploading to them. I've just demonstrated the process to my husband and it took four minutes to access my Instagram photos and go through the editing process. As a web-based software developer, he was impressed. As a busy woman who doesn't have time to faff around uploading photos that are already online elsewhere, I was impressed.
A perfect size to stereotypically fit in a handbag (or laptop bag, Filofax, briefcase or suit jacket pocket), I love this as my first ever 'boasting book'. Skimming through my Instagram album takes ages with over 2,500 images in there. Here, I've got the best of our Spring and Summer ready to hand. They would also make excellent Christmas presents for grandparents!
I will be ordering from Printrbook again, because it's quick, easy, good value for money and really good quality.
I was provided with a free review code to produce a book, my opinion is honest and unbiased.
