Chatbooks Instagram Photo Book #Review #ChatbookBlogger

     My main passion in life is my kids.  I may struggle and deal with lots of frustration, anger, and sadness sometimes because of them, but I would never want to go through life without having kids, especially the ones that I have.  I am a mom, through and through.  I'm not Tiffany, I am my children's mother.  And maybe some people think that losing myself and my identity for the sake of my children is sad.  But I just don't think that there is anything about myself that I love more than the children I have raised, despite their flaws.  It's not the only part of me and I am aware that there is more to me than them, it's just the part that I am most proud of and most excited to share with people.  No, I'm not one of THOSE moms.  I don't discuss my baby's bowel movements or drippy nose, but my attention is definitely always on them.  Part of that is my shyness and my need to pull attention away from myself.  But most of it is because I am absolutely in love with my kids.

      I mean, there is more to me if you want to know.  For instance, I am a wife to an absolutely amazing man that I fell in love with way back in high school.  I love drawing and singing, I think I'm fairly good at both.  I have social anxiety sometimes and get panic attacks when confronted about ANYTHING... it's why I never cause trouble or say what's on my mind.  I am very quiet, even sometimes if I know you.  It's also why I am weak and never stand up for myself.  I'm also pretty short and have really nice skin and surprisingly soft hair considering all the damage I've done to it over the years.  And I love photography.  I think I'm also pretty good at that.

     So of course, because I use social networks, Instagram is definitely one of them.  At least, it is when I have a working phone.  I don't post ridiculous amounts of kid photos each day or anything.  I average probably one every three days or so, usually something we are doing at the time.  I post them because eventually, I want my pictures printed.

      I adore photo books.  And the Instagram Series Chatbooks are exactly the kind of book I need.  First, because it's a super important decision making factor when I buy things, let me tell you that these are affordable.  Not "affordable", like when someone says it's affordable just to find out that it's $20 for 10 pages, I mean ACTUALLY affordable.  These books have 60 photos (30 front and back pages) and costs $6, with only $1 shipping.  So $7 in all.

     If I'm calculating this right, then I would need a new book about every 6 months.  So for $7, I would be getting a book with 6 months worth of our lives inside of it.  So I know that even when I am too lazy to have my pictures printed, at least I can have them auto printed in a neat book form for about $14 per year.  It's something that I don't have to think about and can't mess up.  Memories will be right there on the page, in the mail without me having to remember to do it or take time out of my busy schedule to dictate every caption and Title.  In that photo above, that's 80's Day at school and 20's Night at church.  Those photos cost me about $.50 each to have printed and bound.

Photo of Boog courtesy of Kasi Pratt.

     Okay, now that we've discussed the price, let me tell you how it works.  When you first make an account and go to the Instagram Series part of the Chatbooks app, you will be guided through the process of accessing your Instagram account and books will automatically be made for you.  It will create a cover using one of the Instagram photos.  You can easily change the cover if you'd like.  The spine is also automatically marked with the dates of both the oldest photo in the book and the newest.  See what I mean?

Volume 1: 3 April 2013 - 13 Mar 2014

      I think that's so awesome!  I am so unorganized, that this is such a relief to me.  And not only on the spine, but each page has the photo date at the top corner just above the photo!  I can look back and see exactly what date a certain event was.  Thank you for that, Chatbook!

     When you go into the book editing part, you can change the caption or leave it as whatever caption you used when you uploaded the photo to Instagram.  You can also do what I did and remove captions from your book altogether in the book settings menu.  From here you can also choose to  exclude certain photos from the book.  And this s the only part that I wished had been different.  Although you can choose to exclude photos from one of your books, I didn't see where you could add a different photo.  You can in custom books, but I didn't see that option for the Instagram subscriptions.

     The user interface on the app is pretty simple to follow.  Although I removed captions, I was left chewing my nails so to speak until the books came, wondering if I had done it right.  So there were a few times that I was a little unsure of what I was doing, but I managed and the books came out great.  I absolutely recommend this to anyone with a personal or family Instagram account.  I REALLY wish that there was a Facebook program like it.  But then I would probably be getting a couple books a month if there was, so maybe it's best there isn't.
     Do you get your Instagram photos printed?
     To learn more, check out Chatbooks on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and on their website.

     Stay tuned for a giveaway in the next couple of days!  But in the meantime, use code RHHYVKUM to get your first Instagram Series book free when you start a subscription.

Except for the product(s) given to me for the purpose of reviewing, I received no compensation for this post. All opinions are 100% my own.