Mother’s Day Gift Idea – Photo Book from Shutterfly

Have you figured out your Mother’s Day gift giving?

I haven’t.  I always struggle with what gift to get my parents for birthdays, mother’s day, father’s day, Christmas, etc.  Actually, I think getting any adult a gift for any holiday or event is incredibly difficult.  I think most of us have more than we need and we often buy the things we want for ourselves anyway.  This is where the gift giving challenge begins.  What do you get the person that has everything?

Meaningful Gifts

Because we all have enough “stuff”, I try to find gift ideas that mean something.  This last Christmas I gave a photo book to my parents and my husband’s parents.  They all seemed to genuinely appreciate and love the gift.

My SIL and BFF had both shared their great experiences of creating photo books through Shutterfly, so I decided to give it a try.  I also had a great experience with Shutterfly.  I thought the software was easy to use, there are a ton of layout options, and you can customize the layouts and designs to fit your style.  Make sure to give yourself plenty of time to put the book together because it takes some time to select your pictures, organize them, and put them in the layout.

Mother’s Day Photo Book Gift Ideas

I don’t know if there is anything more valuable to me than my pictures of our family.  A photo book is a great way to bring together these favorite moments and memories into a beautiful coffee table book.

Here are some ideas of photo books you could create for a mother’s day gift:

• Growing Up – Favorite pictures of you and your siblings with your mom
• Grandma – Pick your best pictures of your mom with her grandkids
• Flashback – Best pictures of your mom’s family (her siblings, parents, grandparents)
• Yearbook – Best pictures from the family from the last year
• Event – Pick your favorite pictures from a memorable event (i.e. Have you been on any trips together?)

My Shutterfly Photo Books

I decided to create a yearbook style photo book for the Christmas gift for the parents.  I plan on doing this each year and making a copy for our family to keep as well.  One of the things I liked about Shutterfly is that you can create a copy of the book after you had it all edited.  This allowed me to make slight variations of the books that would be more appropriate for each parent.  For example, for my husband’s graduation pages I adjusted the layout on the book for his parents to have more pictures of them.

Here are some of our 2010 yearbook pages.

I put the pictures in chronological order and grouped layouts by event or activity.  I selected simple backgrounds and simple layouts to help keep it timeless.  For the last few pages I put in some of my favorite random pictures from throughout the year.

Have you create a photo book? Check out Shutterfly to get started.