Transform photos from your phone into printed books with Groovebook

Sometimes, a person wants a few prints, whether to send to one's mom, put on a bulletin board, or use in a project for school. Living in this digital age, many of us take lots of photos; alas, the pics often stay on our smart phones. Are you old enough to remember exposing film in a camera, then rewinding the roll and taking it to the shop or drug store to be developed?  Ah, the good old days.  Polaroids, cardboard disposable cameras - but I digress. I've been using an application called Groovebook to order monthly photo books of my prints, delivered to my home.

I simply log into the app and choose photos to upload every month.  The company prints the photos, up to 100 a month, and binds them in a small, 3" X 5" bound booklet with tear-out pages.  If you upload less than 100 photos per month - you can just send them a few at a time - Groovebook will make duplicate copies of your choices for a total of 100 copies per book.

The prints are not the greatest quality - that is my biggest problem with the app.  But every month I am mailed a new book, and the pages are perforated so they can be torn out and used elsewhere. You can also reorder or gift copies of books you like.  I pay only $2.99 a month for my subscription, and because I defaulted to the standard shipping (14-21 days to wait) my shipping is free.  You can get your books faster if you pay a little more to upgrade.  

The site also offers other gifts such as magnets, ($5 each), mouse pads, playing cards, and notepads, but I haven't tried any of those yet.  You need to find a minimum of 40 and a maximum of 100 photos a month, but you can go back in your photo archives each time and pull up old ones if you don't have enough recent ones.  

I've liked using Groovebook - I've mailed parts of books to family and friends, and have kept most for myself.  Colorful covers change every month.  This app does not replace the local CVS or Walgreens, Tiny Prints or Shutterfly for me, all of which I sometimes use for my photo products.  I'll probably decide to end the subscription at some point. But, for now, I'm glad to have a handy way to not have all my photos stuck just on my computer, phone, drive or cloud.