My 2023 book is here!

As I have confessed before, I’m not entirely sure why I’m so obsessed with my end-of-year books. It must be my latent scrapbooking tendencies from the 1990’s (Thanks to the Creative Memories company, It was years after giving up scrapbooking before I could walk past the sticker aisle at Hobby Lobby without frantically searching for new items.) Creating digital scrapbook seems totally sensible, and I’ve been doing that since the early 2000’s. But It does seem a little weird to download all of the photos and posts that were already published online from the prior year into a physical, printed book. Yet - I absolutely love it.

Apparently the Dutch service, IntoRealPages, that I have been using for the past 8+ years to download from my original Tumblr site also automatically downloads from SquareSpace, which is the platform I am now using. So next year’s book will hopefully work. But the process could not be easier, literally one click, and everything automatically downloads from my site and is formatted into a month-by-month format. And the book quality is really terrific.

Each year the Big Decision is what will go on the cover. I try to mix up the colors year-over-year, but also pick the best photos (which inevitably came from Montana’s lens!) So this year’s is Montana’s amazing fall sunset shot which I accented with the medium gray theme.

The book starts out with a photo collage of random images in random order, which is kind of fun. Notable in this year’s collage are the many screenshots of the wildfire we endured last summer.

Everything is published in date sequence (with the dates), and they also automatically add these little title pages between the months.

It is nice to be able to have the captions automatically included in the book.

I am guessing by the thickness that I posted more photos last year than any prior year! I don’t see that trend reversing any time soon.