Print my Instagram with Chatbooks | Review

I adore photo’s. I take probably hundreds a week. I always have and always will. Most of them are not very well composed and are deleted but there’s usually one a day that I love, of my son, my pets, family or friends. Occasionally I take a decent selfie (with the help of filters)!

My favourites are posted to Instagram. Now, this is where I am a rubbish blogger. As a blogger, you are supposed to have a plan for your social media and with Instagram, you tend to get more followers if you have a ‘theme’ to your uploads. I don’t have a theme or a plan or anything as Instagram is MY social media. I’ve lost Facebook to blogging – I don’t get to see half as much about my real life friend’s anymore, although that does mean that I spend less time on there, but I don’t want to lose Instagram and become calculated about what I post. It’s not that I think people who do plan, are selling out or something, it’s just that I love my feed and my profile.

Bear and I can often spend a good ten minutes looking back at our photo’s – I think he has inherited my love for them too, but I don’t always want to hand my phone over to him, especially at bedtime as I limit screen time.

Last year I found a company on Instagram, called Chatbooks. They print your Instagram feed into fabulous square books that you can hold in your hands. You can choose which photo’s to include or leave out if you’ve reposted a photo to enter a competition for instance. You can also choose to include or delete your captions, #hashtags and the date from the finished book. 

What grabbed my attention even more, was the price. $8 per book, delivered to the USA. That’s under £6 in UK pounds. Woo hoo I thought! So much cheaper than making a photo book online. However, at this point, they weren’t delivering to the UK and I knew that they would end up costing so much more.

Now though, I am delighted to tell you that they deliver to the UK for $10 per 60 page book (1 photo per page). That’s it. $10 dollars per book, including postage. Approximately £7. That’s incredible!

There are lots of options now as well. You can upgrade each book to a hardcover for a further $5 per book (£3.50) and also create a custom book including photo’s that are stored on your computer, Facebook or phone and not on your Instagram feed. Custom books can have anything from 30 – 366 photo’s and so can be made to celebrate your holiday photo’s or you could even take a photo of your children’s art work before they are relegated from the kitchen fridge or cupboard, to the bin storage and then print a book showing their progression through the years. 

You don’t need to own a computer though – you can create books on your phone which I find the easiest, using their App, on iPhone or Android, and do what I do, which is sign up to automated printing, ‘Ongoing Photo Book Series’. When I have uploaded 60 photo’s to Instagram since my last print date, I get notified that my next book will print in 3 days. That then enables me to log in and delete any photo’s that I don’t want printing although I tend to do that every few days. I have missed the notification once or twice but to be honest, it’s not that much of a big deal. As you can upload short video’s to Chatbooks now, these are printed as the cover frame. When you upload a video to Instagram, you can customise the cover frame of a video yourself so that you print the frame you prefer. Alternatively you can leave video’s out of your books.

Other great options are to change the photo on the cover, change the title of each book and if you don’t want your photo’s to show in chronological order, you can simply drag and drop each photo to the page you want it to show on.

 

One option that I love is that you can print from a hashtag. So, if you wanted to print a book with all your work based photo’s on, a pet, or of one child per book for instance, you could create your own hashtag such as #photosofbella (its best to make a hashtag that someone else is unlikely to use) and create an ongoing series including only the hashtag photo’s instead of having to create a custom book if you’re short of time. 

I keep my books within Bear’s reach and I love it when he picks them up and looks through them. They bring back so many memories and I love that when he’s grown up *sniff sniff, I will be able to look back at all the fun we had, regardless of whether technology has left me behind and they won’t all be stuck, stored on a disc or in a cloud somewhere as lets face it, most of us intend to print our photo’s off but its often a job for ‘another day’. I can then hand them down to him too.

If you would like to use Chatbooks, go to your app store or android equivalent and download the app. Once you have downloaded it, register and input code R7P7JPNY AND. The code will entitle you to receive your first book for FREE (you may have to pay postage, please check). This code means that I will get credit for referring you but if you sign up, you will also receive a code that you can pass on to your friends and family.

I hope you love it as much as I do.

Love

 

**Disclosure: I was given a small discount to pay for a book to be printed and delivered but this did not sway my view on the product and all views and comments are my own. You can tell this particularly as I ordered my entire collection and continue to receive more books that I pay for myself!