The second best part of traveling (the first is, of course, traveling itself!) is getting to relive some of your best travel memories through the photos or videos you take. But sometimes digital photos just sitting on our phones or computers don’t always do them justice. Sometimes you just want to turn your favorite travel moments into something real – something you can hold, flip through, and truly relive. Like a photo book!
After traveling around Europe in January and then a bit around Argentina with my partner, we decided that we want to somehow make our memories more tangible rather than just having digital photos on our phones. So when Mixbook reached out to me, I knew that I had to make a travel photo book highlighting our best travel memories from the 2023/2024 season.
In this blog post, I am sharing my honest personal experience using Mixbook, including what was the process like creating my first photo book and what the end product looks like.
What is Mixbook?
Mixbook is an easy-to-use online platform that lets you create beautiful, custom photo books that are perfect for any occasion. Whether you’re looking to capture memories from a vacation, a wedding, or just everyday moments, Mixbook offers tons of design options to help you tell your story. With its drag-and-drop editor, you can upload your photos, choose from a variety of templates, and personalize every page to make your photo book uniquely yours. They also offer cards and other personalized printed products like calendars or wall prints.
When I tell you that their online platform is super easy to use, I mean VERY easy. I don’t think I ever used a more intuitive and simple system and I tried a lot of different ones in the past. From picking the size of the book to selecting a design and then arranging photos, everything looked seamless.
Creating a photo book
After registering on Mixbook, you can click through their pre-made travel photo book designs that you can use as a starting point. They have a wide selection of travel or occasion themes that you can select such as beach, city, cruise, or honeymoon. If neither fits your vision or you would like to DIY it all by yourself you can start completely from a blank canvas.
The books come in three different sizes:
- Landscape – 6×8 / 11×8.5 / 14×11 inches horizontal option that’s great for showcasing wide-angle shots or travel landscapes.
- Square – 6×6 / 8.5×8.5 / 10×10 / 12×12 inches square size offers a bit more space to work with while still being portable.
- Portrait – 8.5×11 inches photo book that is super portable and great for more portrait photos.
After choosing your photo book size, then you can also select what book type you would like: softcover, hardcover, or lay flat. As well as the paper (like semi-gloss or matter) and cover finishes (glossy or matte). You can change finishes and sizes at the end of the order as well, so no worries if you change your mind while you create your photo book. The starting price is always 21 pages but you can add more if you want for an additional price.
Once you select your form and theme of the photo book, the fun part – designing – begins! First, you upload all the photos you might want to use to the system (super easy as well!). You can add photos from your computer or upload them straight from the phone using a QR code. After you have all your photos in the editor, you can sort them out by date, and file name, so it makes it a bit easier to look for the ones you need. Also, I loved that it hides the photos you already used in the book, so you don’t by accident use the same ones.
You can select different layouts of grids or create your own by adjusting the sizes of photo frames. After that all you need to do is drag and drop, it’s that easy!
If you want to personalize it even more, you can add text, different background, and even stickers! Mixbook has a huge library to choose from, but if you want to add your own, you also can. The whole process is very easy and at no point I felt lost or thought that it got complicated. It really depends on the time you have to create a photo book and your imagination.
While I designed and created my travel book solo, Mixbook has a wonderful option for collaborating with other users. It’s perfect if you are creating a family photo album or any school yearbook, where you need to have a few people working on it. You can invite contributors by entering their email addresses.
Once you’re happy with your creation, all that is left to do is order. You can choose from standard to express shipping. I found that standard shipping was quite fast and the photo book reached my address within a week, so big thumbs up for that.
My final photo book
For my project, I selected a square photo album (12×12 inches) with a semi-gloss paper finish and glossy hardcover. Honestly, the quality of the paper and how the photos looked were spectacular! I used only photos that I took with the phone and neither of them looked grainy or bad. I was very pleasantly surprised by how good they all looked.
Now that I have the book and looked at it like 100 times, I could have added some stickers or personalized it more. But that’s something to play around with in the future. For this first travel photo book I love the minimalistic approach I took and I feel like the photos speak for themselves.
All in all, I love how it turned out and I am already thinking of doing another one for the next year or even using Mixbook to do photo books for specific trips.
Check out the Mixbook deals page for any -50% offers available. They usually have frequent discounts and sales going on, so you can snag your first photo book at a relatively low price.
