Happy

For many years now I have made photo books using the Apple system that worked directly from my photo library on my Mac. I have made them with holiday, travel and event photos, but I also started a project of removing old photos from disintegrating albums, scanning them and creating family books by year. They have been very successful, even making the old, rubbish photos look good and I was getting on very well working through the years very quickly. 

Then Apple stopped doing photo books. I was devastated. To continue with the project meant finding a new system, such as Blurb which I know many people use. But this would involve learning a new system from scratch and hoping that someone was doing books of the same format and quality as I was used to. I gave up.

Then I found that Motif, the company which produced the books for Apple, was setting up a system which worked in the same way as the old one. Sadly it did not get good reviews. There seemed to be problems with orders and when I tried it, it did not seem to have the same ease of working that I had been used to. I gave up again.

Then recently I got an email describing all the changes they had made to the system, so I tried again. And it worked wonderfully - in the same way, directly through my photo library on my Mac, no need for downloading. And it was brilliantly flexible; I could design the pages as I wanted.  It was a dream to work with. I did a trial book, 1991 the next in the series . . . just to see.

And today the book arrived - beautifully packaged, as they always were. Oh joy! The book is the same high quality reproduction on the same quality paper - in fact the book is just the same as the previous one in every way. Okay their books are not cheap, I am sure they are more expensive than anyone else’s but, with ease of use and quality like this, I have no problem with that. After all these are meant to last a long time. 

I am happy! 

We should be at the Hay Festival this weekend, but it has gone digital and I have a whole programme planned. Wordsworth readings at 6.30 today and Stephen Fry later. Lots on tomorrow and next week.

A wild day - such wind. And yet sunny.  And the collie in the picture is Sunny - a lovely family dog we had for a long time.