When I was a young kid, it used to be a fun thing to periodically sit at the dining room table and bring out the shoebox of family photos, and divvy them up between my sister and me. Dad would keep a few too. The goal was to create our own photo albums of the photos we had selected.

As I got older I would continue this practice of curating the best of my photos into photo albums. But with the digital age upon us, like many people I found myself with fewer photos and slides and negatives to manage and archive, but with mounting numbers of their digital equivalents.

And you can’t exactly put a JPEG into a photo album now can you?

Well sure you can, as I would soon find out.

For ten years or so I have, from time to time, trotted out my virtual shoebox of photos to put together a photo album. Not just a virtual album, as you would do on Flickr or Facebook, but a real world honest-to-goodness published book of photographs.

There are lots of ways to accomplish this, but the service I chose and stuck with was My Publisher (www.mypublisher.com).

I recently did a couple of new albums, which they call “photobooks”. One is to showcase my woodworking projects, the other to collect some photos taken around Owen Sound and Grey and Bruce counties, where we now live.

Here’s the woodworking one:

Click here (or on the cover photo) to view the whole book.

Here’s the Owen Sound and Grey Bruce one:

Click here (or on the cover photo) to view the whole book.

I seem to have forgotten to include my name on the Owen Sound book. Duh. That’s what happens when you stay up late to work on these things. But as it’s a print run of only one copy, I think I can remember who took the pictures.