best software to create photo albums.

We travel as a family 3 times a year to various locations. Afterwards I frequently have between 500 -1000 photos. I would like to put the top 100 - 150 into an album which can then be printed up.. I have used Shutterfly (cheap) and several of the other on line services which are really poor quality. I have been using MYPUBLISHER for the past couple years and although the quality of the photo books have been good, the creative options are very very limited and the books are all beginning to look the same. I usually put between 2 and 4 photos per page and about half the time, I like to put in comments!

OK thats the scoop. Anyone have any recommendations??? My computer is a MAC. Has anyone used Picaboo or Picassa or Blurb????

What other recommendations are there???

Thanks!!
David

Hello David

I use Aperture 3 (software program on the Mac) and quite like it as it provides a framework (if you want to use it to create your album). Its not cheap but then there is a rich functionality in the program to organise and edit your pictures.

I have not tried the album printing service as I view 99.9% of my photographs on screen.

Hope this helps

Kaaeed

Picasa is very good in organizing photos on your computer and in getting them uploaded/shared online. It also has basic editing support that can be handy. Its free, you might as well give it a shot before buying something.

Surprised you have not mentioned iPhoto. I have been happy with the quality and creative control.

Sanjay

I have been using Blurb for the past 5 months. Two books. Works great. They do a good job printing. Have no experience with any other service but I highly recommend Blurb. Joe

DAVEBUCK said:

We travel as a family 3 times a year to various locations. Afterwards I frequently have between 500 -1000 photos. I would like to put the top 100 - 150 into an album which can then be printed up.. I have used Shutterfly (cheap) and several of the other on line services which are really poor quality. I have been using MYPUBLISHER for the past couple years and although the quality of the photo books have been good, the creative options are very very limited and the books are all beginning to look the same. I usually put between 2 and 4 photos per page and about half the time, I like to put in comments!

OK thats the scoop. Anyone have any recommendations??? My computer is a MAC. Has anyone used Picaboo or Picassa or Blurb????

Click to expand...

If you really want the ultimate in control, then you need to invest in page layout and vector graphics editor programs. This is the kinda thing used to design and layout magazines, ads, and brochures.

The Mac is an ideal platform for this. There are many choices:

Layout and desktop publishing

Adobe InDesign – page layout
Pages – part of iWork
QuarkXPress – page layout
RagTime
Ready,Set,Go!
Scribus – page layout
The Print Shop – page layout

Vector graphics

Adobe Illustrator
Corel DRAW
Inkscape – free
Macromedia FreeHand

I would recommend InDesign and either CorelDRAW or Illustrator. These are complex programs and you will need some training and experience to master them... but it won't take you long to do simple scrapbook layouts.

I personally don't use all of these (don't need the capabilities of InDesign and use CorelDRAW instead of Illustrator). CorelDRAW is quite capable of doing scrapbooks...done many of them.

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Thanks for the input. As expected there are a wide variety of answers. I will give Iphoto and Aperture a try.

I don't have the time for a VERY COMPLEX program but I need something with flexibility. I have Aperture 1. I will see about upgrading to aperture 3. It seems to be very flexible and allows a lot of customization!

I was just doing some research and saw a program called Viovio! Anyone know anything about it???

Since you asked the question what the "best" is, not the cheapest.... As a professional photographer that needs to be able to create very unique and visually stunning digital albums in as little time as possible, I've tried a lot of different packages, from commercial layout applications, photoshop templates, web based tools, free packages from album publishes, etc., and have found nothing even remotely close to the speed, flexibility and easy of a product called Lumapix. I use the Extreme version, which is not inexpensive, but amazing. I have no affiliation with them, just a happy user for the last 3 years. Only drawback is that it is Windows only and I use a Mac for photo editing, so I use a VMWare WIndows 7 VM to run it. Once you design an album, you can export the page images and drop them into any online album publishing tool such as Shutterfly, or higher quality lab albums (Asuka, Pounds, bay, etc.), you just drop your pre flattened page images from Lumapix into the full page image template on the publishers site. For sub $100 albums, I find Pounds Labs press books a good buy.

Thanks,

It looks like a phenomenal program. As an amateur who just does family photo albums, what do you think of the scrapbook version? I don't want to spend $200!

I'd suggest calling or emailing them about the one feature that seems to missing on the lower priced versions of the product, which is multipage albums. I would find it a pain to have to create a separate project for every page. Also, I create pages that are 12"x24" 2 page spreads, and it seems like one time my install forgot it was licensed to be Extreme and limited my page size to something smaller. If you can create large pages, and multiple pages in the lower versions, then I don't think that the other differences would matter.

Aperture 3 has a free 30 day trial. You should try before you buy it. I'm on the fence myself since I can do custom layouts with QuarkXPress and Photoshop. Here's my review on them and the program:

http://www.photobookgirl.com/blog/photobookgirl-goes-underwater-my-apple-aperture-photo-book-review/

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Add another recommendation for http://www.blurb.com . I found their Booksmart software to be pretty flexible and easy to use. Good prices, too.

Spoke to the folks at fotofusion. You are correct.

The $39 version of Lumapix only allows you to create one page at a time. That is a real bummer. It is now Xed off the list. I don't want to spend $200-400 on the software program alone. I am NOT a professional photographer!

I am leaning towards Adoramapix, with Aperture2 as my second choice. Also MyPublisher is very good but since the templates are fixed, the albums get a little uniform after a while. I have made 4 books of 75 pages and they are beginning to look to similar for my taste.

Thanks

I definitely understand. That was why I started my original post with "you asked for "best"... I knew that it is somewhat price prohibitive. I will say in their defense that I have owned for 3 years, never had to pay to update to new versions, and can install on as many computers as you want so long as you only use one at a time. The price makes sense when you are billing hours for album creation, but not so easily justified for home use, I just don't know of anything else similar. I bought it at a trade show once when they guy in their booth was having people walk up with any fancy album page that might take 5-10 minutes to do in Photoshop and reproducing it (with his own images) in about 10 seconds... it was pretty amazing and I was sold.