With a huge selection of options from hardcover or softcover to magazine-style or classic leather or linen cover, Photo Books come in dozens of sizes, styles and prices to suite a variety of purposes. What a great way to display your digital scrapbook, wedding photos, baby pics, vacation photos or other special occasion pictures. Instead of getting individual prints made then spending hours manually inserting them into a photobook or cutting and pasting a scrapbook, a digitally prepared photo book is the way to go.
I tried out a variety of photo book sites and found several that stood out from the crowd.
SmileBooks
I found the easiest site to use with excellent creative options was SmileBooks. After downloading their free software I could customize my photo book, which resides on my hard drive; I didn't have to upload each individual photo. Their templates are completely customizable to move and resize. Plus, Smilebooks has an interesting collection of page backgrounds with real photographs. You can even use your own images as page backgrounds. Smilebooks also has the thickest paper of the sites I visited: 135lb compared to a standard 100lb. Read full review of SmileBooks.
If you feel creatively challenged, SmileBooks is offering a new SmileBooks Design Service. You just have to select the photos and your photo book size and style, and their creative team will design your book for you. It only costs $1 per page for the service plus the cost of your book.
I tried it and my book is gorgeous. It would have taken me days to create the book myself and it would not have been half as good. Read the full review of SmileBook Design Service.
Polaroid My Memories Suite is a top notch, easy-to-use photo album software program for creating photo books, scrapbooks, DVD slideshows and greeting cards. Crossplatform - works on PC and MAC. The standard suite includes a set of themed designer templates on separate discs - Holiday Designer, Travel & Wedding Designer, Family Times and Kids & Sports. The deluxe package also includes a large, hardbound personalized photobook (up to 26 pages) and four personalized greeting cards. Read full review of Polaroid My Memories Suite -
For sheer variety of photo book sizes and creative options (you have the option to upload PDFs of photo pages you created with your own software package) and especially price, Viovio shines. Viovio also has a great online community for sharing your creations. Read full Viovio Photo Book Review.
Shutterfly
Of the mainstream online photo services I found that Shutterfly stand out for its ease-of-use and fast service. There is a large variety of page styles and backgrounds to choose from including baby, wedding, travel, kids, seasonal, Halloween, Christmas, Valentine's Day, Mother's and Father's Day, pets, sports and more, plus patterns, stripes, dots and solids. You can select different photo edge styles and use different backgrounds for each page, plus add captions and text in a range of fonts, sizes and colors. You can even have a page with text only. Shutterfly also gives you the option of uploading jpegs of pages you created with your own software (such as Photoshop Elements) and placing them into photo books. Learn more about printing your digital layouts with Shutterfly.
Kodak Gallery
Kodak Gallery is another service that excels at making the photo book creation process fast and easy with an array of options for sizes, styles, backgrounds and layouts.Kodak has increased their photo book offerings and they now offer personalized covers plus linen die cut and leather covers. The Kodak Gallery photo book software is very easy to use.
Learn more about making photo books at Kodak Gallery.
All companies reviewed produce high quality photo books on acid-free archival paper with a variety of cover choices from hardcover casewrap to leather and linen.
Below is a chart featuring major photo book services listing major features and ratings. Individual detailed reviews of each service are also available by clicking on the Review links.
