Photobook Services

Three services make great photo albums

Giving the gift of a hardcover photo album — filled with photos of family, friends or whatever images you cherish — is a special treat. At least it is for me.

So, in recent years, I've been creating and ordering hardcover albums for family members on birthdays and other special occasions.

This year, I'm doing a little experiment by making photo albums using three different hosts — Shutterfly, Apple Computer and PhotoWorks — to find the one that reproduces the best-quality photos and is also easy to use.

I'll design one with family photos for my Dad; another with nature shots and portraits; and a third for my daughter's 13th birthday, featuring her at the karate dojo and at tournaments.

For this experiment, I'll include a few of the same photos in all three albums, so I can compare the quality of reproduction and choose the host/service I'll return to for future albums.

Shutterfly: Shutterfly does a good job of making Christmas cards (I've received many that demonstrate high-quality photo reproduction), so I'm eager to see how well it does with photo albums.

I click to Shutterfly.com, sign up for a membership, and click to the place where I can begin creating a hardcover photo album.

There I'm directed to copy photos from my hard drive to the album's photo collection. I browse my photos and select quite a few from the past year that I want in the album that will be a gift for my Dad. I copy those to a separate folder so I can access them easily for transfer.

The actual transfer process includes selecting up to 10 photos and uploading them to the album space. Then 10 more, and 10 more, until I have the ones I want to include and more, just in case. This transfer takes the most time.

Next I choose a cover photo, and the design for each page, which can include one, two or four photos. I select and place the photos for each page, and then add captions, or not. This part is easy, but it takes time to do it just the way I want.

With 20 pages of assorted family photos, I think I'm done, so I view the album, tweak a bit more with page designs and captions, and then save the finished album.

To order the printed, hardcover album, I click to the Shutterfly store and the Saved Projects file to find my album. I fill out the order form, submit, and wait about a week for the album to arrive in the mail. The 20-page album costs $37, including tax and shipping.

It looks great — very professional, and perfect for a gift to my Dad.

Apple: Next, I create a hardcover photo album using Apple's publication service that's readily accessible by clicking the Book icon in iPhoto.

The easiest way to create a photo album in iPhoto, I've discovered, is to first create an iPhoto folder of the pictures to be included, and highlight it before clicking the Book icon, so those photos will be displayed when making the book (rather than the entire iPhoto collection).

Then, I press the Book icon and choose a book size and style (formal, travel, baby, family, contemporary, etc.) I pick a plain picture book style.

Building the album from my folder of selected photos is easy. For each page, I choose the number of photos and then drag images into those spaces from the row of photos displayed at the top. I can choose a design that includes space for a caption or just the photos.

I can also add extra pages to the album for a small per-page fee. (This is true for Shutterfly and PhotoWorks albums as well.)

My completed album has 32 pages (I added 12 pages) and costs $53, including tax and shipping.

PhotoWorks: Like the other album-making services, PhotoWorks offers a few choices for album style, number of photos on each page and captions.

Both PhotoWorks and Shutterfly provide rather slow tools for moving photos from the hard drive to the album, but both offer downloadable software to speed up the process.

I stick with the standard method for now, and after several rounds of transferring five photos at a time, I design the pages and fill them with the photos.

The page-design process is similar across all three hosts. Once I have access to the photos, the rest can be quick and easy.

This completed album has 20 pages and costs $50 including shipping and handling.

Which to choose? Picking a service is tricky because you can't judge how good the published album will look until you buy one and see. Unless, of course, you take my word.

Here's what I think.

All three albums use fairly similar page designs, and the quality of their hardcover bookbinding is excellent. The difference lies in the quality of their photo reproduction, and that's important in a photo album, so let's look at photo quality.

Comparing the same photos included in all three albums, I have to say that Apple and Shutterfly did the best job of maintaining the original photos' quality. PhotoWorks album photos look slightly paler than the others, but only slightly. They still look pretty good.

For Macintosh users, Apple's album-creation process is easier than the others because album photos don't have to be uploaded separately for the design and production process.

Also, if you want to learn from my mistakes, one bit of advice: Don't include full-page photos of faces without borders. The results are too in-your-face. Full page is fine, but make sure there is some kind of border around a face that fills the page.

Other than that, the album-making process is reasonably priced and easy enough to become a habit, especially for birthdays, graduations, vacations, Christmas or any other good excuse.

Write Linda Knapp at lknapp@seattletimes.com; to read other Getting Started columns, go to: www.seattletimes.com/gettingstarted

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