Preserve and relive your memories with Photolane photo books (Giveaway)

I received a sample for review. 

Enter to win a free Photolane photobook!

Some of the happiest moments of my life have been spent traveling with my family. Experiences, not things, make me happy, and I'm never happier when I'm exploring new places and enjoying new things with the people I love.  Things come and go, but memories last forever.... well, sort of.  The feelings of joy and happiness associated with those memories will always stay with me.   But the details?  Not so much.  Those memories last a whole lot longer when you have photos to help you relive them!

That's why I love creating photo books for each trip we take, and I love taking the photo books out from time to time, letting the photos spark the memories, helping us retell our adventures and our stories.

A few weeks ago, I discovered an easy new way to preserve and share stories: the Photolane app. Photolane lets you create a gorgeous photobook with your photos and video clips in just minutes. You can share the digital photobook online, and you can order a physical photobook, which has 32 pages and measure 8" square. For only $40 you get a hand crafted, one of a kind lay-flat book delivered straight to your front door, in just 5 days. Photolane invited me to create my own photobook and share my experience.

Photolane is an iPhone app (it's not yet available for Android, but that's coming soon).  Download the app on your phone or iPad, and you can use the photos on your device to create and edit as many photo books as you want.  I love that you can save your work and come back to it another time.

Select a theme and a set of photos from your phone, and Photolane will autopopulate your photo book for you. You can also select more photos from your phone if you want.  Photolane claims you can create a book in as little as 5 minutes, but honestly, it took me way more than 5 minutes.  Now that I've created my first book, I could probably create one in 10 or 20 minutes, but it took a while to check out the styles and the layouts, and to figure out how to drag pages around.

You can select from a variety of layouts for each page, including single page layouts, multiple page layouts, and 2-page photo spreads.  Some layouts have text, some don't. Everything is super simple and super easy to use.

You can switch around the order of the pages -- although to be honest, I found it really difficult to do so.  You touch and hold a page, then drag it to where you want it -- but more often than not, it ends up dropping in the wrong place because the pages scroll by so quickly.  You can avoid (or at least minimize) the frustration I went through by selecting the photos in the order in which you want them to appear in your photo book.

I forgot about all my frustrations as soon as I clicked "order".  The photo book arrived at my home in just a few days, and quality

The photo book came inside a cardboard sleeve with 4 photos printed on it (protecting the photo on the front of the book), and a cutout window revealing the photo book title. It's a special touch that I wasn't expecting, so it was a nice surprise!

I am so happy with how this photo book turned out! Photolane did a fantastic job.  The layout is minimal and ultra clean, so the focus is on the photos, not the embellishments.  The photos are printed out in beautiful color and detail, on heavy, high quality paper. The pages lay flat, so it's easy to flip through the book and relive all your memories.

The learning curve for using the app was a bit steeper than I expected, but now that I know how to use it, churning out gorgeous photo books is going to be so easy!  We've got a few trips scheduled this spring and summer, so I'm definitely keeping Photolane app on my phone...

Win a Photolane photo book

Two lucky Bonggamom Finds readers will each receive a code good for a free Photolane photobook (8"x8", 32 pages) and free shipping!

Enter via Rafflecopter below. Giveaway ends 11:59 PST on March 18, 2015. I will draw a winner after that date and post their name once the winner has been confirmed and verified.  Continental US residents only. For more giveaway rules, click here.  Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway



Disclosure: I received a free photo book for review purposes.  Giveaway prizes provided by Ph The views and opinions expressed here are my own.
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