FREE Photo Book from Blurb 2012 – Make a Facebook Photo Book in Minutes

I check my Facebook several times a day. Okay, maybe more than just several times a day. If you’re on Facebook, I’m sure you’d agree that it enables us to stay in touch with the everyday happenings in our friends’ lives and keeps us connected to each other in a way that would be very difficult to do without it. With today’s technology and social media, never before have our lives been more documented and documentable. I take photos and videos practically every day of my little guy and a fair number of them end up on Facebook. For many folks, once those photos are taken, they only exist in digital form. I have come to learn that my sole purpose in life is to encourage you to get those darned photos off your computer! If you’re new to photo books – check out my epic multi-part how-to series!

What’s nice about making a Facebook book is that it’s pretty effortless. With Blurb’s Facebook app, you give the app permission to slurp your Facebook photos and the program automatically lays out your book for you.  You can still make tweaks after the app has done its work, but it’s a heck of a lot easier than having to lay out the pages yourself. I have several hundred photos in my Facebook account, so I had to narrow down the ones that I wanted to be in the book.  There’s a limit of 240 photos as the book is limited to 240 pages (1 photo per page). As you can see, I got a bit carried away selecting photos.

You can even select your friends photos, or photos that you’re tagged in. The program starts to upload your photos AND captions and comments that you or your friends may have added. That’s the fun part. It unfortunately doesn’t pick up the “Likes”, so if you want to add them, you could add that information yourself afterwards. It would be great if this feature were added in future.

The program will tell you if there are any “unsupported characters or symbols”. The app replaces them with “standard Latin characters”. Regardless, you can make your tweaks after the automated process is finished.  Within minutes, the program lays out your photos for along with any captions and all the funny comments as well.  I like the clean layout with the speech bubble at top.  The photo is automatically cropped to a square, which may or may not work for your particular photo.  If important elements are cut out because of the cropping, you may need to recompose the photo with the “Fill Photo” or “Fit Photo” button.  Fit Photo will zoom out so you can see the entire original photo (Fill Photo is the default.)

For more control over the layouts, you can switch to Bookify mode.  This will allow you to move the elements on the page and change to other templates and change background colors.

Clicking on the “Auto Create” button at the top right will give you options to sort your photos.  You can go by oldest first, most recent first, filename A-Z or your own sorting.  I went with most recent first, which is actually the way that it was automatically laid out.

PhotoBookGirl Tips:

1. If you max out on the 240 photo limit of the book, you won’t be able to add more photos if you change your mind on the photos, even if you’ve deleted the page. You’ll need to delete the photos from the upload as well.  Click on “Design Cover” and show the photos “not used in book”.  Click your delete key on any unwanted photos, then go back and “Get Photos” and you’ll be able to add more up to the 240 photo/page limit. Don’t forget to design your covers and spine too!
2. If one of your photos has tons of comments, you may see an “…” to show that the rest of the comment had to be edited down for size.  You can make the font size smaller to get in more of the comments. If necessary, you can also insert another page and type in manually the rest of the comments that didn’t make it in initially;
3. To help narrow down the photos for your book, it may be good to pick a single topic or album on which to base your book. A perfect topic for a Facebook book may be photos from your wedding that you or your friends posted which generated lots of comments, or only photos of your little ones, or baby shower, birthday, graduation, or prom. That can help you focus in on theme if you have lots of photos on Facebook;
4. Keep in mind that Blurb books are priced by page ranges unlike many other photo book companies, so if your book has 42 pages, by all means go up to 60 pages because the cost is the same! Blurb has changed their pricing structure and cost is per page now. (Updated 3/13/2013).

I’m really pleased with how my book turned out.  It was a fun book.  I didn’t mess with the layouts much except to zoom out to get the full photo into the frame, so that made it quicker to make than the average book I create.

As for photo quality, since Facebook compresses your images, your printed pictures may not be as sharp as your originals (Blurb pops up a note to remind you of this). I did see more pixelation in my book than normal, but nothing distracting. The highlight is really your friends’ comments. The photos printed out nice and bright and were true to color. Facebook allows you to choose a higher quality upload, so if you think you’d like to make a photo book from your Facebook photos, then the higher resolution upload is recommended going forward.

Make Your Own Photo Book for FREE!

The folks at Blurb not only provided me with a complimentary book to try out their Facebook app, but they are giving everyone a FREE Blurb book as well!  I had teased in my Facebook post that I had something better than a giveaway for you all.  Well, it is a giveaway, but you don’t have to do anything to enter and everyone wins!  I think that’s pretty cool.

The fine print is at end of the post.  But you have to hurry – this code is only good until 11:59pm your local time, Wednesday, October 3, 2012.

How to Claim Your FREE Blurb Photo Book

1) Click here to go to Blurb;

2) Allow it to link to your FB;

3) Select your photos and let the app do the work;

4) Preview the automatically created pages for optional changes then order;

5) At checkout use my exclusive coupon code: INSTAPBGIRL

You can also apply this code to any Blurb book you’ve created, it doesn’t have to be a Facebook book.  You can also try out the Instagram app as I reviewed before, or put it towards another type of Blurb book. You just pay the balance after the credit is applied. Shipping is separate – estimated shipping for me was $7.99.  You can check shipping cost on Blurb’s site under Books & Pricing.

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Promo details: Get up to $19.95 USD, CAD, $21.95 AUD and 17.95 Euros off your book total (GBP not allowed). This offer is valid until Wednesday, 10/3/2012, 11:59pm your local time. Each coupon may only be used by a customer once and on books made by you. This offer may not be combined with other promotional codes, volume discounts or used retroactively on previous orders. Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Blurb. If you click on a link to Blurb’s site and make a purchase, I receive a referral fee from the company. Regardless, my opinions are my own.

Thank you to Blurb for its sponsorship of this generous giveaway!

Check out all the latest coupon codes and promos on my Photo Book Deals page!

Check out all the latest Blurb deals here!

While we’re on the topic of Facebook, if you liked my Facebook fan page and Facebook posts are the only way that you stay in touch with me, please note that Facebook doesn’t show you all of my posts in your feed.  You will see everything if you visit my Facebook fan page directly, but if you rely on seeing me magically pop up in your feed, you’re probably missing a good amount of photo book news!

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