Photo books

Does anybody have some good suggestions as to who prints the best photo books. I would like to make a family book for my mother and I'm wondering which service to use. Thank You

There are a lot of good companies doing books. It really depends on how much you want to spend and what type of cover Hard, Soft, Cloth, hard board, leather

If you want a reasonal price and an easy program try shutterfly. If you want to go up some try mpix or Mckenna pro they have a full range of products from cheap to very expensive. Thier programs to build are harder to use and some versions require you build all the pages in PS before making a book. They do have a version that is called easy books. with a cannned program built in so you just upload and add pictures to the pages

If you want the best looking "photobook", I would have to recommend Adoramapix. I just used them to make wedding albums for my brother. Although there was one slight hitch with the first book I printed, I think the fact that they use real Fuji photographic paper makes their books look better than the companies that print off presses. I also think their pricing is competitive, especially for the longer books. With a coupon code, a full out 76 page with full uv coating 12 x 12 book (huge) cost me about $210 delivered while 76 page 8 x 8 books (w/o coating) were around $75-$80. However, if you just want a fun, shorter book and photographic quality prints are not that important, some of the other companies such as Apple, Kodak, Shutterfly and Mypublisher often run specials and might be a little cheaper and the recipients have always seemed very happy with them.

I did find the software at Apple and Shutterfly a little more intuitive than Adorama's (though with Adorama I was trying to do a much more complicated layout than I attempted with the other two companies). Unlike the other companies where you can add pages to a book, Adorama limits the number of pages to 14, 26, 38, 50, or 76 pages (including front/back/inside covers). If price is a concern, before you make a book, check out the shipping charges, often those books for $10 come with $8+ shipping charges per book. Finally, if you use Adorama, make sure to leave about a 1/4 inch margin on all sides of the pages except the fold if otherwise you run the risk of having parts of your pictures "cropped."

Take a look to Blurb, really nice work and not to expensive

I've had very favorable results multiple times with Blurb, with books of all black and white images as well as books with a mix of color and BW. They offer two methods of building books, one Internet based and the other an application called Booksmart than runs on a local machine.

Before Blurb I used WHCC for two books. Excellent paper and cover quality. Cost was approx. twice the cost of Blurb for books of equivalent size and # of pages. As of the last time I used WHCC they did not offer the functional equivalent of Blurb's "Booksmart" book-building application. Preparing/formatting pages for WHCC was a completely manual process. Sure learned a lot "doing it all" myself. Made me greatly appreciate the ease of use and flexibility of Blurb's Booksmart.

Some sites allow one to make published books available "for sale" on their websites, something else Blurb does well.

Good luck on your search for a bookmaker. Suggest you don't try to analyze this to death. Pick a firm and "just do it." You'll learn a lot.

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'Live for today, but plan for tomorrow.'

As many people have pointed out, there are a lot of considerations. Building the book can take a lot of work, and most people order a couple copies - for the recipient and themselves since they tend to be family heirlooms. Like everything in life, you basically have cost and quality.

I recommend you take a peak at our books at http://www.viovio.com - we try to address price and quality, by letting you choose both in the same order with the same book. See our http://www.viovio.com/wiki/Express and http://www.viovio.com/wiki/Premium for a comparison. Additionally you can order either quality level in hard or soft cover.

Good luck and remember the message is more important than the messenger ;-)

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http://www.viovio.com/spider

To Do: Take pictures, Hug Wife, Write Code, Change Diaper, Create Photo Books, Work on House, repeat.

I have just had a photo book printed for my brother of old family photographs using Albelli. I was very pleased with the colour reproduction and the quality. The software was quite easy to use and was adaptable. There is also an automatic option to place the photographs you choose.

I have used Shutterfly and they have done a great job in a very timely manner. However, I chose to make a book with over 80 pages. Because they use glue to bind the book a few pages came loose. They quickly sent me another book that worked fine and I was able to keep the original book, as well. However, if I purchase another book with over 25 pages or so, I would want it to be bound with stitches.

Just a thought for your consideration.

Deb

I'm a professional book designer/publisher and use Blurb for most of my client work... while not low in cost - if you are just making a one-off book to keep for yourself, it is a great option... and I"d be happy to help out if you need assistance! Good Luck!

If you are a Costco member I highly recommend trying one of their books. I recently had one made and was very pleased with the results. For a book with a full photo on the front it costs $24.99 and for a leather bound one with a photo in the center it costs $29.99. The base price includes 15 double-sided pages with every additional page running an extra $0.78. The one I had made came to about 42 pages and was only ran me about $38. Very high quality with a turn-around time of about 5-7 days.

Just a suggestion.

-Becky