Pixum has a wide range of photo books, photo prints, wall art, calendars and other fun products which can be personalised with your own photos and now, they've introduced a range of Advent Calendars to the list so you can add a personal touch to your Christmas countdown this year.

A wide range of Advent Calendars are available with prices starting at £8.99 and we've been busy creating our very own advent calendars to see how good the quality is and to find out if the product you get is worth the price tag.

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Pixum Personalised Photo Advent Calendar Features

The Pixum Advent Calendar range is pretty extensive and all of them have slightly different designs, are available in a range of sizes and offer different treats hidden behind the doors. 

On the Pixum app, available for Android and iOS, you have the choice of an Advent Calendar with Kinder chocolates, Luxury Advent Calendar with Ferrero chocolates, Advent Calendar with Kinder Surprise Eggs and an Advent Calendar which you can add custom contents to. More options are available if you access the Pixum website via your desktop computer which includes a Photo Advent Calendar which features hidden photos behind the doors and a Retro Advent Calendar which also features photos rather than chocolates. 

As you'd expect, you get 24 doors to open which hide the sweet treats or photos behind them and you can add one or multiple images to the front of the Advent Calendar to personalise it. Plus, there are images and wording you can add to your designs to wish family members a 'Merry Christmas' and more. 

Key Features

• Fully Customisable 
• Branded premium chocolates used
• Easy to design
• Various sizes available
• Sustainable packaging on the newest design
• Premium quality

As there are so many designs to choose from, we thought we'd put the four options that are available on the Pixum app to the test which are: Luxury Advent Calendar with Ferrero chocolates, Advent Calendar with Kinder Surprise Eggs, Advent Calendar with custom contents and the Advent Calendar with Kinder chocolates. We went for the biggest size available in each option but smaller sizes are available should you have less room or want to spend a little less money. 

Luxury Advent Calendar

• Filled with Raffaello, Ferrero tenderly and Ferrero Rocher
• Blister pack is 100% biodegradable
• Size options: 30x20cm and 48x36cm
• Prices start at £26.95

Advent Calendar with kinder surprise eggs

• Filled with 11 kinder surprise eggs and a mix of Kinder Mini, Kinder Bueno Mini and Kinder Schoko Bons
• Size: 48x36cm
• Prices start at £49.95

Advent Calendar with kinder chocolates

• Filled with Kinder Mini, Kinder Bueno mini and Kinder Schoko Bons
• Size options: 30x20cm and 48x36cm
• Prices start at £19.99

Advent Calendar Custom Content

• Fill the compartments with your own small gifts
• Size: 48x36x3.5cm (it's big!)
• Prices start at £19.99

Pixum Personalised Photo Advent Calendar Handling & Performance 

The easiest and quickest way to create your personalised Pixum Advent Calendar is by downloading the Pixum app which is free and available for both Android and iOS. Once downloaded, you'll see various photo products that are available for personalisation and then when you click through to Advent Calendars, 4 options will become available to you. 

Select the one you'd like to create and a list of sizes and orientations become available which you simply click on to select then press 'start your calendar'. The first thing you are asked to do is to select your photos which we found a bit weird as we didn't know how many we could use or what designs were available. It turns out you can select up to 4 images and when you do, the app automatically puts them into a layout for you. To change the layout, click on the design and various other options will appear across the bottom of the app which range from 1-4 photos. You can also easily move the photos around by clicking on them individually and choosing what you want to replace it with. There aren't really any photo editing tools apart from an option to rotate the photo so do make sure your images are how you want them to look before adding them to a design. 

To personalise the Advent Calendars even further, you can add graphics to your design by clicking what looks like a frog top-right of the app. We're guessing the designs can be used on various Pixum products as not all of them are of a festive theme but they're fun none-the-less. The graphics range from cute to modern and everything in between and they're a fun way to add an extra festive touch to your Advent Calendars. To add a graphic, simply click the one you want to use and it appears on your design then you just pinch and zoom to adjust the size or press and move it to adjust where it sits. 

Another good feature is that the app will tell you if an image's quality isn't good enough for printing so you won't end up with a substandard product on delivery. 

Once you're happy, simply click the checkout button and follow the instructions to payment where you will be able to see the price for postage which is an extra cost so do take this into consideration when making your purchase. 

If you don't have the time to finish a project in one session, the app will save all of your products (so long as you're logged in) so you can finish them at another time. 

Overall the Pixum app is really easy to use, it makes designing photo gifts a doddle and it means you can create gifts from the comfort of your sofa while watching TV. 

As for the Advent Calendars themselves, we could not be more pleased with them! At first, the price of the Advent Calendars from Pixum did make us make that noise builders do when you ask them how expensive something is going to be but, honestly, when they arrived, we soon forgot the price and just appreciated the joy they brought us.

"As for the Advent Calendars themselves, we could not be more pleased with them! It's amazing what a personalised gift can do, especially at a time when we all need some cheering up," ePHOTOzine. 

It's amazing what a personalised gift can do, especially at a time when we all need some cheering up, and to receive a Personalised Photo Advent Calendar introduced a little bit of festive magic that was well and truly needed. There was just something really special about holding a product someone had taken the time to design and send you. 

The Advent Calendars arrived via Royal Mail, in around 5-7 days after placing the order and they were well packaged so won't get damaged in transit. All of the Advent Calendars feel well made and if you buy the Luxury one, the blister pack the chocolates sit-in is now 100% biodegradable. Photo quality is excellent and if you order the larger sized Advent Calendars as we did, you'll definitely get the 'wow' factor when you open them as they're pretty big!

Having the option to fill your own Advent Calendar is a nice touch, as are the photo Advent Calendars you can make on the Pixum website but not in the app. 

If you're looking for a way to bring a bit of early Christmas joy to someone, you'll most certainly brighten their day with a Pixum Personalised Photo Advent Calendar. They made us smile and we're sure they'll make you smile, too. 

Value For Money

The Pixum Personalised Photo Advent Calendars range vastly in price from £8.99 to over £50 and there's shipping to add on, too. When you compare it to a store-bought Advent Calendar, they're expensive but considering what you get and how they look when they arrive, we really do think they're worth investing in. However, there's still a small part of us that do think they're quite expensive even though they do make a lovely one-off gift. 

Similar products on the market are available from other photography retailers such as Jessops but they all use Cewe to print the photo calendars so are roughly the same price and products.

Pixum Personalised Photo Advent Calendar Verdict

We have to admit that we were sceptical about the pricing of the Pixum Personalised Photo Advent Calendar range as, after all, a couple of quid gets you 24 chocolates hidden behind colourful doors from any supermarket. However, once the products arrived on our doorstep, we soon realised that paying £8.99 up for an advent calendar that's fully personalised, printed superbly and has some really tasty treats inside is actually quite reasonable. Opening the packaging up and seeing our own photos printed onto something which can be so generic really did bring a lot of joy. It also adds to the magic and sparkle of the festive period, something we all need a little bit of right now! 

If you want to start your gifting early this year, a personalised photo advent calendar from Pixum is definitely a present that will bring smiles to faces young and old and for that, we're happy to 'Highly Recommend' them. 

Pixum's photo advent calendars are guaranteed to bring a smile to the faces of friends and family during the festive season.