Celebrate National Pet Day with Shutterfly!

So first - happy national pet day! Go give your pets an extra hug and a special treat today! Today, I'm excited to share my special way of memorializing my pets. Obviously, I'm huge on photography. Since we got our first little furry pet together in 2008, we've been snapping away photos of the animals in our lives. I'm happy to have so many memories of my pets - from videos of my guinea pigs nomming away on carrots to large prints of Raynor and Teemo above my bed.

On St. Patrick's Day, my guinea pig Pichu passed, after nearly 5 years of life with us. I went back through the photos of him that I've dumped onto the internet since 2005, happy that I had the images of him when he could fit into a small glass and was tiny. It really made me realize how important to me it is that I continue to keep these memories of my pets. When Shutterfly contacted me about sharing ways to celebrate National Pet Day with photo memories, I realized I had very few in print of Raynor and Teemo. Sure, I've got loads of photos floating on the web, but not much else. Tons of photos of Jason and I hang around the house, we even have two photo books of our own adventures, but the pups? Nada.

If you are interested in actually having a photo session with your dog like I so often seem to do, I have some tips I wrote up back in February you can revisit here. You don't have to have a fancy camera to take these photos either - a lot of my favorites of Raynor and Teemo are taken with a point and shoot camera - and they print just like the ones taken with my large camera! Here's a page of my photobook from Shutterfly with images taken by both my point and shoot and DSLR - can you tell which camera took which photo?

Even Instagram or cell phone photos these day can be easily turned into something. These coasters would be perfect as a project to turn your Instagram photos into. You can simply login into your Instagram account with Shutterfly and the images are all ready for you to use!

I chose to make a photo book of Teemo and Raynor. Shutterfly makes it incredibly easy to upload your files - even from Facebook or Instagram - and then automatically turn it into a book. I chose the custom path but also to have the photos automatically inserted and organized by date. I changed a few things around, added text, and voila! Photobook while watching a TV show. They have a variety of styles to choose from, and I personally fell for the chalkboard chic story book style. I almost went with the artist's portfolio or the creative type styles, and it took me awhile of playing around to decide which worked best. You can switch styles and layouts easily in the web interface, which is quite simple to use, yet allows you a lot of control.

There are a lot of styles of photo books available - hard cover or soft cover, different sizes, etc. I chose a 8.5" x 11" because it fit well between our large wedding album and smaller honeymoon album. I'm personally not a fan of lay flat pages just because I like how pages in books lay - hence the detail of my lovely pages in the photo book.

The book, along with my coasters and a note pad all customized with Teemo and Raynor's faces, came quickly. Everything was as expected - I've ordered from Shutterfly before to get a mousepad as well as custom calendars, and I'm always happy with their print quality. And I'm picky. They have so many custom photo gift to choose from - I personally love the idea of a blanket with one of the pups on it as I think animals work on blankets quite well (#everythingwithanimals, right?)

Do you have many printed memories of your pets around the home? Tell me, what would you order from Shutterfly in the comments? Use code SHIP30 to get free shipping on orders over 30 dollars!

Products in this post were provided by Shutterfly. This indicates I received a product in exchange for review, although the opinions and ideas expressed are purely my own. For more information - read the disclosure of this blog.