Kodak Kiosk.

So last week I was invited to the Kodak Kiosk blogger event at Discount Drug Mart.

I was pretty excited about this.  I take a billion pictures every day but I rarely print any of them.  I just don't have time to sort through them and decide which ones are print worthy.  And while I have a good printer it seems like I'm always out of ink or paper when I finally get around to actually printing anything for myself.  Boo.  So I was open to some new ideas:

The whole hook with these kiosks is that they link to your social media and pull pictures from there.  Right now it's just Facebook but Instagram is happening in the near future.  Also the kisoks can wirelessly pull photos from your phone.  Nifty.

They have all sorts of cool products - photos!  cards!  dvd's! collages!  But I was particularly interested in the photo books.  I've been meaning to make us some nice, family, photo books for a long time now.  It would be nice to have a tangible reminder of our adventures.  And with all of the editing and printing options available it's possible to make a professional, beautiful, displayable coffee table style book. YES.

But here's the thing.  Editing is HARD.  When you have folder after folder after folder filled with adorable it's overwhelming to even know where to begin.   Even just with the photos on my phone.  To sit down and figure out what you want...well... it's overwhelming.  Especially when you consider how many pictures I have on my phone at any given moment:

900.  I have 900 as of writing this post and I cleared a lot off my phone before the iphone update.  YEAH.

Which is why this kiosk is awesome.  Because I already do cull the mass of photos.  Via facebook.  I try very hard to only post to facebook what is interesting or extra adorable.  So while I may take 50 pictures in a day only one or two of those make it to my facebook feed.  Which means that if I want to make a highlight book using only the best of the best using facebook as my sole picture source works out really well:

So I stole the idea from one of the fellow attendees and made a book of our summer.  I went back as far as the pictures from my daughter's last day of school, and stopped adding photos at the first day of school picture from this year.  Easy.

It was super painless and simple to compile.  Plus the awesome Kodak software automatically arranged them in close to chronological order.   I didn't even have to mess with it at all.  So in a few minutes and a few clicks I had this:

A beautiful, simple, bound, high quality, and most importantly finished book of our summer.  Amazing.

But what's even more awesome?  The kids LOVE it.  LOVE.  Like crazy love.  They want to read the "Summer Book" all the time:

They request it as a bedtime story and read it to each other almost every day reliving all of our fun adventures.  It's so adorable I can't even handle it. 

And as a parent who works hard to make sure there are lots of adventures to photograph it makes me VERY happy that this reinforces their memories and experiences.

On one page:  Wade Oval Wed at the Cleveland Art Museum, the Romanian Festival, Asphalt Cinema at Impett Park, Boat trip in Geneva, Great Lakes Science Center, and an adorable baby.  It was a fantastic summer.

I want to go back and make one for every season!  It certainly would be easy enough.

So a big thank you to Kodak and Drug Mart for this technology.  I can think of about a million more things that I want to do with it.  Yay!

Disclosure:  I was NOT compensated for this post.  I was invited to attend the blogger event and received a goodie bag from Drug Mart and Kodak for attending.  All opinions are my own.