5 Reasons Photobooks are Better than Flowers
You know the feeling. Mother’s Day rolls around once again, a birthday you were supposed to have memorized seemingly materializes in your calendar overnight, or you look over your shoulder to find the anniversary of the first time you ordered takeout together sneaking up on you.
Don’t despair – and don’t just make a beeline for the usual bouquets. Here are five reasons why the ultimate gift may be right in front of you, rather than hanging around in the supermarket doorway.
They are truly sentimental
Photobooks offer a totally new perspective on pictures that, for a long time, only existed on your phone, or on social media, or within an often-overlooked Google photos account. We’re so used to taking and seeing photos on our phones that, even when we create something truly special – even when it makes its way onto our Instagram feed, or our phone’s wallpaper – it’s all too easy for us to eventually overlook them.
Moving them into something physical – particularly when it’s printed to an incredibly high quality – means breathing new life into old memories, and there are few things that will bring about happy tears more readily than that.
They last forever
We all know the fatal flaw that flowers suffer from. Unless the receiver is adept at pressing, preserving, or encasing their flowers in resin, there really is no way to sugar-coat the inevitable: flowers will, at some point or another, end up fading, drooping, and disappearing forever.
A photo memory book is, in that respect, the opposite. Not only do they last forever, but they are designed to be enjoyed forever. They aren’t something to be seen, enjoyed once, then shelved for the next sixty years – they are made with the express purpose of giving someone something that can be looked at, revisited, shown off and appreciated many times over.
How often do you find yourself flicking back through the older photos on your phone? Chances are, while you do it from time to time, you don’t do it enough. Every picture you take, you take because you want to remember and revisit that moment in the future – whether it’s a face, caught in time, or a sight you may never see in quite the same way again.
Giving someone the gift of revisiting those memories is, in our opinion, totally unequalled.
They celebrate life as it is right now
A photobook is a little like a single volume – a part of a much larger collection, with each book representing another part of life. The photobook you make for your summer trip to the beach will be very different to the photobook you create using the snapshots from your Christmas at home, your baby’s first six months, or your first year as a married couple.
This is part of the beauty of photobooks. You don’t need to cram every aspect of life into a single book – nor would you want to. Instead, you can use each book as a celebration of one moment in time – a trip, a phase, an event, that time you tried mastering the art of wildlife photography together, or a part of a much longer journey shared between you and someone special.
After only a few years, you’ll have a budding collection of volumes – a series of books that all offer a different perspective on one life.
They are an idea for life
To that end, giving someone a thoughtfully curated photobook gives you the perfect gift idea to use over and over again. Helping your loved one to amass that shelf of volumes, and to gradually build their collection of beautiful, once-in-a-lifetime moments is a great way of ensuring you always have a thoughtful gift idea for every Christmas, birthday, anniversary, and Valentine’s that comes your way.
They are totally personal
One of the best things about photobooks? They’re unique, and about as personal as it gets. Every photo you pick, you pick because you know it will bring a smile to the face of the receiver – and every single one evokes unique memories of sounds, smells, flavours, and experiences that will never be replicated.
There’s a lot to love about gift giving, but there’s even more to love about gift giving when the gift in question is as personal and sentimental as this one. Sure, flowers are great – a true classic of every major holiday, anniversary, and major life event – but our hearts will always lie with the photobook as the ultimate way of showing your love and celebrating the big (and little) moments in life.
