Pictures Worth Eleventy Thousand Words (To Me, Anyway).

A few days ago marked the 23rd anniversary of the day I watched my grandpa suffer a stroke. He was just standing there - reaching into the cupboard at the top of the stairs, when he started slurring his words into a mish mash of confusing gibberish. I was 10, but even then I could tell something was wrong. That was one of the first brushes I had with mortality; the knowledge that my grandparents wouldn't be around forever...and that's a hard pill to swallow when you are 10, right?

I guess that it is partly this "impression of mortality" that fuels this fire in me to know more about my family. I often find myself asking what kind of people my grandparents were when they were my age. Were they at all like me (heaven help them)? Did they have an interest in politics, and did they ever think they would see the day when a black man and a woman were racing toward the White House door? Did they want to travel far and wide? Or was the thought of Africa and Europe or anything outside a 50 mile radius from home just completely unimaginable to them? How about technology - were they as intrigued with it as I am? Where today we have the IPhone and the MP3 player and space travel and major medical processes that were completely and utterly unheard of then ... well, they had the horse and buggy and then the car, and electricity and indoor plumbing, telephones and the Great Depression and war with Hitler and wow! Say all of that fast 5 times. And then think of more.

I am constantly looking for bits of myself in the members of my family. Why is it that I have no filters? Or how come I am so stubborn? Maybe so-and-so was afflicted with that too. I've proven that I am prone to sticking my foot in my mouth - did he-or-she-or-whosit-who have an issue with that as well? How come the girls in my family are so independent? Maybe it can be attributed to the fact that what's-her-name had to raise all of her kids alone, and she passed her "grit" down through the ages? Maybe I inherited all of my weird neurosis, or maybe they are all the result of my social experiences, who knows. It's still fun to try and see myself in them - I'm totally learning that understanding your heritage can explain more about the person you are today.

So perhaps I should get to the point - my first "user review", so to speak, of a website and a product, with a little sentimentality thrown in for good measure.

The Sentimental Part

Sometime this fall, I found hundreds of EXTRAORDINARY photos in my basement (extraordinary to me, anyway), and I decided that I needed to do something with them. It seemed sad that they were just rotting in a box instead of being displayed in all of their glory. So I decided that everyone in my family was getting copies for Christmas, and a little subterfuge that I refer to as "the project" was borne.

I started scanning and photoshopping pictures by the bajillions, removing scratches, changing contrast, fixing missing pixels, whatever. I even recreated a couple of badly preserved faces (oh photoshop! How I love thee!). I cannot even begin to describe to you how amazing it was. All sorts of questions started boiling to the surface - what was it like to be in the South Pacific during the war? How did my grandma do it with a new baby and a husband gone to war? Who were some of the people smiling back at me? Why didn't I do this while they were alive so that I could ask?

Then I took a few of my favorites and put them into a book for Christmas gifts. It's bound in leather, printed on nice, thick paper...fabulous, really, if I do say so myself. I had no idea I was such a sucker for preservation - but then, I have always loved old people, and anything that speaks to what our society was like way-back-when.

The Review Part

I ended up using mypublisher.com, although I am not sure I would recommend it. Here's the low down:

The Good -
Their concept is really cool - they have this software that you download to your PC and you create your whole book there (which is great, because that way you don't have to upload all of your pictures and worry about whether you have an internet connection while you work), and then once you have put the finishing touches on things, you upload the whole package one time, order as many copies as you need, and PRESTO! You have your book.

The Bad -
One problem is that their software is buggy. It doesn't work consistently throughout - sometimes you can resize/change your text, sometimes you can't. Or clicking on something on one page doesn't result in the same thing when you do it on another page. This all really, really irritates me, because in the world of software development, user acceptance testing is just not that hard...and they clearly didn't spend enough time working out their kinks. Secondly - I was able to upload and order a finished book using a template that THEY KNEW didn't work (I found out later). This is breaking the first rule of quality - they created 5 books with known errors, which caused me much heartburn and dissatisfaction, and doubled their own fulfillment cost (since they had to replace them all for free). For shame! Seriously. Whatever. Plus, I wasn't even sure I was going to get them all before Christmas thanks to the inevitable mail crunch. Scary! My fingernails are chewed down to nubbins thanks to them, even if they did make it right in the end.

The Ugly -
This is the icing on the cake. MyPublisher.com DOES NOT HAVE A CALL CENTER FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE. Can you believe that? This is 2008, people! You can't expect customers to be happy if they can't call you - but that is even doubly true when they have a valid reason to rip your head off. Instead of pleasant phone service, customers have to send an email into a giant black hole and hope they get a response. After spending a bajillion dollars on their product in the first place. It's the kind of moment you have when you think, "Well, I guess I shoulda just flushed $500 bucks down the freakin' toilet." I hate it when that happens. That's a horrendous user experience considering the investment.

Sigh.

Other people I know have used Shutterfly and seem to love it. I may try that instead next.

One thing is for sure - I'm gonna keep making more and more books, and probably always thinking of new questions to ask that I never did...or learning new things about myself. I recommend that EVERYONE should undertake their own version of "The Project" - especially if you still have access to the faces staring back at you from each picture.

Just don't use mypublisher.