Photo Yearbook from MYPRINT

Where are your photos kept? Most likely the answer is - on my Facebook profile, or on my smartphone, or in my Google Photos folder. How many of you actually print photos in a tangible format? Very few, I would guess. When guests come over you can show them on your desktop or laptop. Physical photo albums on the shelf contain only parents's and grandparents's photos. You are practically absent from them - as if a generation had ceased to exist.

Well yes, different times, different technologies. And that's fine. But I remember one moment this year when a Polaroid camera was brought to a BNI business networking morning, and we - entrepreneurs past 30 with our iPhones, Samsungs and everything else - were photographing ourselves with the Polaroid like small children, squealing with delight, shaking the little print and waiting for the moment when a not-particularly-high-quality image would develop. But so dear and tangible.

And so in our little family there has long been a tradition of making photo moments tangible. Since 2007, every year we make a photo yearbook - a kind of family photo CV: what good things happened to us that year, what people we met, where we were, how we've changed. There's something therapeutic, even philosophical, about it, because flipping through these yearbooks you realise everything is transient and people change not just outwardly but also inwardly (contrary to popular belief) - they grow, develop, become more experienced, freer, more confident, and so on.

Right, I got carried away - back to the subject of this article. Every year (for 7 years running) I've used the Pictures Happy service for making such a photo book. This year I decided to try something new - the Myprint.lv story album (because both photos and text matter to me). In it I combined photos from the last two years - 2014 and 2015 - making two yearbooks in one. Well, I can share the experience.

Picking up the order at A. Čaka iela 128, I was pleasantly surprised by the packaging - a cardboard box tied with a linen thread and a logo sticker. The yearbook itself was wrapped like an expensive gift in white paper, with a letter to the customer enclosed, inviting feedback, as well as a few promotional materials - imitations of the aforementioned Polaroid photos.

Flipping through the book, however, I realised that the Myprint.lv product isn't really suited to our yearbook concept as such - it's better suited to printing carefully selected photographs where the photo itself doesn't need textual explanation, where the photo itself is the story.

If we return to the online book-building tool, it differs from Pictures Happy in several ways. The first difference - before creating a book you don't have to upload all the images you want to use in the project, but can add them directly from your computer as you go. I can mark that as a big plus, as it isn't always possible to select all the needed or meaningful photos at once.

The second difference, which in my case I would put more in the minus column, is that the pages have no templates or grids into which you can slot photos - because when you get carried away combining things independently without any discipline, you can end up with a certain patchwork effect: trying to squeeze more than four photos onto one page, adding text, and so on. In printed form this ends up looking rather chaotic, unprofessional, with small but visible white gaps between photos that I'd manually misaligned. A grid simply wouldn't allow such misalignments - you choose what you want, you get what you chose.

The Myprint.lv book-building tool is much more forgiving about image quality - it doesn't protest against low-quality images but lets you place them, and the result gets printed. In other words, you only have yourself to blame if you can't judge what is and isn't a good photo. But you know how it is when you're not a professional - if a photo is so dear, just so dear, the quality or accidental blur fades into the background.

The online tool is quite fast - everything loads and adds in an instant. You can also easily track already completed pages and how many are still to go, i.e. see an overview of the project. The ordering process is quick, clear, with all the relevant email notifications - order received, in production, and so on.

Conclusion - the Myprint.lv story album is better suited as a gift with selected, high-quality photographs, most likely without text on the pages, even though adding it is possible. An album for mood, for memories of moments. Photos really should be spread across the full page, not skimping on space. As a yearbook - a photo overview of events - probably not. I certainly don't regret trying it. Now the bookshelf has a slightly different format photo yearbook and a new experience.