I was looking at my phone over Christmas, and realising how many apps I use on a regular basis – once I’d extended that thinking to Macbook apps and a few core websites, this is 150+. I decided I’d play around with a short blog-post on each tool, thinking about what each is good for, and which I’d like to make more use of … there’s always more to learn about everything that’s available online.

Bonusprint has moved on from photo-processing, and last Christmas (noting a theme here), I decided to make a photobook for each year – funny as I’ve been digitising all my other paper-based content – but I’ve always been a bit of a scrapbooker. Checking on MoneySaving Expert, I found that I could get a large, 100 page, hardback photobook for £19, so went ahead rather tentatively with a photobook for 2007. A year later, and the photobook for 2015 is made and on its way to me, including the following pages:

The quality for the photobooks is decent – I’ve describe it as being similar to, but bit better than, an annual! The books do take a surprisingly long time to make – picking the photos from the many that I’ve taken to make the most of the 100 pages that are available (you can pay for extra pages, but still, it’s a good discipline) – you can put anything from 1 to quite a lot of photos on each page, but obviously the more = the smaller they are! You can add text, and in fact anything that you can produce as an image (e.g. a JPeg file) can be inserted into these books, and once in, can  be drag and dropped around. There are various layouts provided, but you can over-ride these. For the first few photobooks I used the software that means that you are working directly online (meaning that I have a couple of stray photos popping up on the wrong pages/upside down), then took advantage of the option to download an app and work offline on my laptop – much faster … just leave plenty of time to upload the finished product, then wait a couple of weeks for it to arrive. I’ll be back to do another one for 2016!

Digital Fingerprint

Digiexplorer (not guru), Senior Lecturer in Digital Marketing @ Manchester Metropolitan University. Interested in digital literacy and digital culture  in the third sector (especially faith). Author of ‘Raising Children in a Digital Age’, regularly checks hashtag #DigitalParenting.