Anyone ever make a photo book?

[thewayne]

Since I shot some 1300 images while in Europe, I thought I'd make a book commemorating our trip. A friend of mine did this after he took his dad to the Reno air races and it came out quite spiffy, I was wondering if anyone else had and who they used and how satisfied they were. I'm only looking to print 2-3 of them.

Comments

[cp.livejournal.com]

After each of our family trips for the past few years, I've made a book with Shutterfly. They have a good desktop uploader application, their web-based book designer is pretty good, very flexible with lots of themes and flourishes, and I've been quite satisfied with the quality of the books themselves. Pretty quick turnaround, too. The downside is that they're a little pricey in my estimation, though they often offer deals to take some of that edge off--I think there's a $20 off right now.

I like them for prints too--I usually wait until they send a deal for 101 free prints and then order a bunch, so all I really pay is the shipping. Which is frankly too high, but it works out to a reasonable per-print price so it's still a deal. :)

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

I loaded and tried their iPad app yesterday and it cropped my pix, which is unacceptable. Maybe there's an option that I can turn it off, I haven't spent much time investigating it. I try to be very careful with my composition and filling the frame, so I don't want some ignorant software casually altering my images.

But thanks for the suggestion, it's definitely worth looking in to.

[cp.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, many of their preset page layouts do use crops other than 3:2, I forgot about that. You can indeed click to adjust the position of the crop, and/or tinker with the page layout itself to resize the photo frames and whatnot, but that obviously introduces a bit more complexity to the process. So I guess it's best for vacation books like mine, where a lot of the photos are more about the kids than anything else. :)

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

That's something I'd like to research sometime - I'd quite like to put out a book of my wildlife photography, as a more affordable option to framed prints, as well more easily permitting short sequences, or the occasional shot that was notable, but not quite high resolution enough to make a good print of sensible size (say, 15x10").

None of the options are especially cheap, of course, especially if the paper's really good, but so it goes. (I've looked around vaguely before, but never thought to keep the results)

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Shutterfly, as CP posted above, looks OK but I need to see if I can tell it to not crop my images.