Scrapbooking
I’m making a book, a “Year in Pictures”, to send to the family for Christmas. I showed my wife the work in progress last night and she commented, “I just realized that you’re the scrapbooker in the family.” I guess she’s right. This blog, the photo album, now the book — it is scrapbooking of sorts, just not using traditional media.
Shutterfly, and all of the other major digital photo printing sites, make books now. Nicely bound, real hardcover books. I started the book in Shutterfly but switched to MyPublisher.com because of the price and because they offer more design choices including a full-bleed (an image that covers an entire page from edge to edge).
Shutterfly’s book designer is all web-based which has advantages and disadvantages. On the down-side, you have to upload all of your images before you can begin working with the book. In my case, that took about 90 minutes. And once the images are uploaded, if you want to tweak them using desktop software like Photoshop, you have to reupload them. Other than that, the Shutterfly book designer is very nice. You choose the photos you would like in the book and those go into a pool. Then you can add pages and drag images from the pool to the page. As you drag images to a page, they are removed from the pool so you don’t accidentally wind up using the same image twice. It is easy to use and offers a lot of layouts. I found it more intuitive to use than the MyPublisher book designer.
To design a book with MyPublisher, you have to download Windows-only software. Since you are working with images directly on your computer, you can begin designing your book right away. And changes to the images are reflected automatically without the need to reupload them. The images and book layout are only uploaded when you purchase the book. However, the software wasn’t intuitive to me at all. There is no image pool like Shutterfly’s and, in what seems like an egregious flaw, you can’t view page layouts and browse images at the same time. What I ended up doing was deciding which 3 or 4 images I wanted on a page and noting their orientation (landscape or portrait). Then I’d switch back to the book and add an empty page that would suit those images. Then I’d switch back to the image browser and add those images to the book which would then flow onto the page. Then switch back to the book view and adjust the images on that page. Repeat.
But, if you can get around the clunky interface, MyPublisher offers many more layout options (80 page layouts with up to 8 images per page compared to Shutterfly’s 16 layouts with up to 6 images per page) including the full-bleed I mentioned. Using this option, you could create your own page layouts in Photoshop, giving you the most flexibility. Ultimately, the full-bleed layout was something I wanted and I was willing to put up with MyPublisher’s interface to get it.
Right now, MyPublisher books are $19.80 for a 20 page book ($10 less than Shutterfly’s). I can’t comment on the quality of the books since I have not received them yet. I’ll post a review of the books themselves when I get them, hopefully next week.