MyMemories Review and Giveaway

The good people at MyMemories recently provided me with two free copies of the MyMemories Digital Scrapbooking Suite - one to review, and one to give away. I had read plenty of rave reviews of MyMemories before, but I've never been much of a scrapbooker. (At least, I thought I'd never been much of a scrapbooker. A few months ago, while looking for some old Art History notes to lend my sister, I found 3 separate scrapbooks dating to 2004. It appears that around the time I graduated high school, I was actually quite the scrapbooker.)

This offer came at the perfect time, though, when I'd begun thinking about creating a more personalized blog header, and wanted to create a banner for my Zazzle store, Wear You Came From. (That one is still in the works.)

I started out trying to create a banner from scratch, using my own creativity. My own creativity wasn't up to the task, and I found the the album templates provided by MyMemories were better for a beginner. The result, which you can see above, was exactly what I was looking for.

This weekend, in honor of the 5th Anniversary of my first date with Ben, I decided to open up MyMemories again and scrapbook some of the pictures from a trip we took to St. Lucia last year for our first wedding anniversary. This time, not being such a rank beginner, I decided to get a little more creative. I used one of the templates available, but removed the embellishments that didn't fit the mood of our trip, and added my own photos from St. Lucia as custom background papers.

Quite frankly, my favorite aspects of these pages are the backgrounds, because St. Lucia itself looked a lot better than Ben and I did. In several of these pages, we have just finished doing things like climbing large hills, and we look it. But even when we were sweaty and haggard and had flyaway hair, the beaches, jungles, oceans, flowers, and pineapples of St. Lucia were gorgeous. (Seriously, did you know how pineapples grow? That one you see there was growing right in front of our cabin, out of a bush right on the ground!)

One of my favorite things about MyMemories is the versatility. You can pop your photos directly into the spots provided and call it a day, or you can move things around and personalize the pages with additional embellishments, photographs, and text. You can showcase historic family photos of your ancestors, or you can create visually interesting layouts for the pictures you took with your iPhone or digital camera last year, or last week.

Now, here comes the part you're interested in, the part where you get a chance to win a copy of the software yourself!

How do you enter to win? It's easy!

First, visit mymemories.com and take a look around. Choose the album template you like most, or would be most likely to use. (I see a family-tree themed template, and they have a whole category called "heritage," which I'm sure would interest my readers!) Then, come back here and leave a comment on this post, telling me which one it is. Make sure to include your e-mail address in the comment if you'd like to be eligible to win.

A winner will be chosen at random from those who comment in the comments section of this post. E-mails do not count. The contest will be open for 1 week. No entries will be accepted after 11:59 PM EST on Tuesday, March 5, 2013.


[Disclosure: I received a free copy of the MyMemories Digital Scrapbooking software to review from MyMemories.com. MyMemories.com is also providing a free copy to give away.]