Choose photo book by price or quality?
For each long trip to another country, I make a photo book containing most of the photos I’ve taken. I’ve tried multiple services for this purpose. Some of them are better than the other. A while back ago I used Snapfish to process my photo books. They were the best alternative for me at that point. I was working on a stationary PC and Snapfish had special client for PC-users to take advantage of. Today, more and more services are available and with even more options to chose from (paper quality, number of pages, hard vs. soft cover etc.).
One downside of Snapfish at that moment, was that the client was quite buggy (at least on my computer). The quality of the prints in the book was also not that astonishing, as I would like them to be.
The day I bought my new Macbook, the possibility to use Snapfish ended. I never got the Mac-version of the software to work out. From what I’ve heard today, they are using an online service instead of a downloadable software client (as they did before).
Two of my books (A trip to India and Thailand) have been ordered from Blurb. Since I’m a regular Mac user now and I like the idea of having a client installed to make my books, they’ve been my No.1 choice. Good price, fast delivery and a very nice client to work with when editing the books. The quality of the prints could be better though. I think the color could be more vibrant than what they are (even on premium paper).
Anyway. It’s hard to compare the quality of the paper/prints if you’re not ordering an exact copy of the book from each provider.
I have recently tried a new online service called Photobox.com. Mainly because I wanted to update my portfolio coffee-table book that I bring to the clients I meet. I thought is was a great opportunity to try a new service.
I must say that the quality of this book is the best one of all the ones I’ve done so far!
The book that I made has 96 pages, a hard cover and premium paper (option). It took me around 1 hour to make the book even though I’ve never tried their service before. To round things up I would like to point out a few thing that came to my mind while I was working with the book.
Great stuff
- Web based (works on all platforms, PC or Mac etc.)
- Simple interface and usage
- Autofill (One click and your book is filled with the images you’ve chosen)
- Many different templates
- Premium book options (Select paper quality, cover etc)
- Payment choices (I like the possibility to use Paypal)
- Multilingual
Not so great
- No software client (Some of us would like to be able to work offline)
- Price indication (You don’t see the price of your book until you’re finished to order. I would like to see what the difference, adding a page or two, would make on the price while I’m working with the book.)
- The price (Although the quality was great I think that $130 is quite much for a 96 pages book. I paid $72 for 122 pages at Blurb with shipping included)
I recommend using Photobox if you’re looking for great quality and a simple interface to work with.
There are tons of online providers out “there”.
What is your choice of provider when it comes to photo books? Please leave a comment below.
Thanks!
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August 27th, 2010 at 7:11 am
Thank you Pierre! I want to try Photobox. But I see is most for Europe. I will ask them if the shipping is not so expensive to US.
They should give you 100 books for free!
Thank you!
Juan
August 27th, 2010 at 8:47 am
Great idea to make a review of this. It’s pretty hard to find quality reviews of book printers these days. Of course there are overviews in magazines but I find they always miss the user experience. Thanks.
August 27th, 2010 at 8:58 am
Thank you Juan!
100 books for free would have been a nice gesture ;-)
August 27th, 2010 at 9:00 am
Thank you Guy!
I feel the same way you do, about the reviews by magazines.
Cheers,
P
August 27th, 2010 at 2:48 pm
I have had good success with Winkflash. Their Prints look amazing too.
September 10th, 2010 at 10:04 pm
Great post and would like to see a poll on more. I was happy with the built in iPhoto book that I built on my Mac (about $100 for 100 pages and hard cover) and have thought about using Costco (I’ve heard good things about the company that runs their printing business–Dry Creek).
Anyone tried lulu?
September 10th, 2010 at 10:51 pm
Thank you Kelly for your comment.
Perhaps Costco or Lulu might be the next provider to test. Anyone out there tried them before?
Thanks, Pierre
October 14th, 2010 at 3:55 pm
Great idea to make a review of this.I want to try Photo box. Can you give me some suggestion.
December 15th, 2010 at 10:12 pm
I’ve used MyPublisher several times but I always wait until they have % off coupons or buy one get one if I want to make a book for myself and have one to give as a gift.
January 6th, 2011 at 2:01 pm
I’ve heard only good stuff about Lulu so I will be trying them out. I use photobox all the time for matt prints, excellent quality, I made one book with them and the quiality was great but I wasn’t too keen on their templates / cover styles and they are costly.
p.s great site you have here! =D
January 24th, 2011 at 1:16 pm
If you are living in Finland, I can recommend Eirikuva(www.eirikuva.fi) as the place to order photo books. Great quality and good software.
January 28th, 2011 at 10:41 am
I have used Blurb twice, once for a photo book and once for a blog-to-book project. I found the Blurb software to be very buggy on my MacBook Pro. It took me many hours of work to complete the blog book because the “slurp” feature didn’t deal with punctuation correctly, so I had to manually proofread and insert punctuation on every page. However, the photo quality was adequate for my purposes, the hard cover binding was good quality, and best of all, a 285-page standard size book cost less than $70 US.
March 25th, 2011 at 5:15 pm
This is probably common knowledge among you, but Shutterfly’s quality leaves much to be desired. The print quality ain’t bad, and the prices are great. But the three books I ordered from them began falling apart within a month. You get what you pay for, I guess.
April 2nd, 2011 at 5:27 pm
There’s another new service called ubyu http://www.ubyubooks.com who have lots of sizes, and options to choose from such as debossing and foiling. Oh and they have three stocks of paper!
October 24th, 2011 at 3:25 am
Easily the highest quality books are from Asukabook.com. They are just amazing. THICK paper, thick covers, you can choose gloss, semi-gloss, matte finish paper. You can get a slipcover, leather covers.. the quality and style is unmatched.
They are a bit exclusive in the sense that they need to verify that you are a professional photographer. They’re marketed primarily at wedding photographers.
Oh yeah… they are EXPENSIVE, but so are weddings.
If you want top quality and are willing to pay for it, I’d go with them.