I'm curious if anyone has ever got a photobook printed.

I've been meaning to get some done using photos from my last 2 holiday trips, to give to my gran. (She got one from some australian relatives and thinks they're brilliant).

I've been getting promo emails from different companies for months, but now I find myself getting round to doing the book on jessops, they don't have any good discount offers.

So, anyone used a photobook company, and have any recommendations?

I had a play with the Jessops one and yeah you can. I didn't find the wizard that great, it has some quirks (to move a picture you have to click and drag on the side of the picture, you can't just click and drag on the centre etc).

Other options like text etc are there.

I think I might just make use of some offers like these:

http://www.photobox.co.uk/landing/pb-free-t3?channel=1800&cid=tasem01&ps=1

Sure they'll end up not being free after P&P and no doubt charging for a few optional (but highly desirable) options, but it'll still be much cheaper than full price. Plus it'll mean I gradually work my way around the systems and companies and be able to decide which is best. I guess when I do use these offers I can post a review of them in a thread for the purpose...

Ok here's part of the first review.

PHOTOBOX

I used the offer posted above for a free A4 photobook. The editer is all web based and loaded quickly and easily here at uni (To be expected really). It's pretty swish, and I quite easily uploaded MOST of my images. It turns out there is a min/max size limit on images, so I had to shrink a half dozen of the photos to get them accepted.

I opted to use the wizard, and selected a classic photobook template. It has to be said that the template offerings looked a bit more polished and stylish than the Jessops wizard I briefly used.

As default you get a hard cover with a cut out window in it, which shows the picture on the first page. You can't print on the inside of the covers, and are restricted in image size for the first and last pages (first page presumably so it fits the window, last page so it doesn't cover their barcode and photobox logo (£5.99 to get the photobox logo removed)). When you upload images you can arrange them in name, date or manual order. The wizard then automatically fills the book using these images and the template.

It did a fairly good job, though the template appeared to leave a lot of margin around the page. Given the resolution of my images, I decided to "unlock" the layout for each page and pretty much enlarged everything to (hopefully) make the pages as marginless as possible.

This process maybe took me a couple of hours to get things looking the way I liked. I then checked out. The checkout page gives you the option for printing on the cover, which costs £7.99 (IIRC) which I decided to take as I wasn't too keen on the cutout idea. It also lets you then have text on the cover, which is handy, and allows you to edit the first page. You also get options for premium paper, a sleeve for the book, and satin finishes to the cover. I chose not to take these.

The final options are postage, standard first class recorded is £3.99, and whether you want to fast track the order for £15 extra.

In total my order for a 36 page A4 photobook came to £16.99. I could have got it for around £6.99 I think without the optional extras and 12 additional pages. Without the offer it would have been pretty expensive though.

Stay tuned for part 2, reviewing the actual book when it arrives.

Looking at their website it's been packed and the estimated Dispatch date is 29th June.

To be honest having several books the same, or same ish, wouldn't be too bad. I mean, if you did the holiday photos each year having the same style, but different colours, it'd be pretty cool.

I'm looking forward to getting my hands on it, totally don't know what to expect. The Australian relatives book they sent my gran was cool in parts but a lot of the images were blatently too low res. Given these are 12-18mp images this shouldn't be a problem, so comes down to the quality of the printing. I got burnt by snapfish I think it was when I tried to print some stiched panoramas, and the print quality was terrible, despite them being over 50mb each! I think sometimes the uploader software compresses large images without telling you.

So I guess we'll wait and see, looks like it'll be here next week some time.

What's the betting Royal Mail loose it!

Well its not here yet

Here are some pictures:


Front cover by Chris_Moody, on Flickr

This is what the wizard opts to do if you don't edit the pages, in the wizard the images looked quite small, but size wise IRL they are ok. I do think the amount of white space is a bit of a waste though.

Wizard page by Chris_Moody, on Flickr


Borderless printing by Chris_Moody, on Flickr


Seafront picture by Chris_Moody, on Flickr


seafront picture "up close" by Chris_Moody, on Flickr

The up-close pic might make the quality look worse than it is, bare in mind that I used my macro lens for that shot, it's pretty close-in.

If anyone is tempted to try photobox can you let me know, I can get a free spiral bound photobook if I refer someone (I'd imagine you can still take up the free photobook offer maybe?) - No worries if you cant be referred and use the cheap photobook offer at the same time...