I thought I’d celebrate reaching the halfway point of Project 52 by rustling up a little collage of all my photos. Not a bad wee representation of our year so far.

I had a bit of a panic about my photos recently, having realised that I had thousands of them stored on my computer with no backups. EEK! Not a smart move at all!

I’ve invested in an external hard drive, and have now copied them all across so that if anything happens to my computer I won’t lose them all.

It has also made me think though, surely the point of taking photos is that you have something lovely to look at, not just so that they can sit in folders on your computer.

I was delighted, then, when I was approached by Albelli to review their photobook software.

I decided to make up a book with pictures of DorkySon aged 2-3. In previous years, usually just after his birthday, I have printed out photos and made up an album of him at each age, but I hadn’t yet got round to doing this year’s one. It takes a lot of time to sit and wait while hundreds of photos print out, and then even more time to put them all into an album in the right order. Collecting the photos in a photobook seemed like a much more convenient option, with a much nicer final product.

I was hugely impressed by how easy the Albelli software is to use. There is a good range of sizes and papers, and you can make the layout as simple or complicated as you like. I opted for a straightforward design, which autofilled with the images I’d chosen, but if you want you can tinker around with the design and add captions, clipart, coloured backgrounds and the like.

My order arrived very quickly, and I was delighted with the results – the glossy paper is well worth the extra spend because it makes the colours in your photos really pop. DorkySon had a brilliant time flicking through the book admiring all the photos of himself, and it’s great for us because it contains all our favourite pictures but takes up so much less space than old-fashioned photo albums.

I was so pleased with our book that when I took all the photos at my brother’s wedding a few weeks later, I went straight back to Albelli and put together half a dozen photobooks as gifts for family and friends who had been at the wedding.

That’s a pretty good indication of how much I like them!

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Disclosure: I was given a £50 voucher code to spend on the Albelli website for the purposes of this review. I received no other payment, and all views and opinions are my own.