photo books, how do you share your large number of photos?

After returning from a week of vacation, I realized that I have piles of photos to process. In the olden days of film, people probably shot a limited number of film. They probably had to carefully shoot since they only had 24 or 36 exposures and a spare roll of film in their pocket.

Digital in some ways had changed that type of mindset. People click all day long until the battery dies. Now if they carried spare batteries and several Gig cards? So I landed up with over 800 photos (mostly keepers, and not duplicates). Every night when we get back to the hotel room, I would charge my batteries, and then transfer the memory cards to a laptop.

So nowadays we have tons of photos of spending time at a kids theme park. When I was growing up, I have only seen two B&W photographs of mine under the age of 6 years. Those were rare photos, and someone in my family has them. My mom has to fill in the details about the photos and how I was. They are about the size of polariod type print. And that was a group shot.

How the times have changed. We want to remember everything from what kids ate at the park, to what rides they go on, how daddy carried them, and where we stayed, and we need to capture all that in photo journalistic style. We have somewhat become their editorial photographers. I have several photos, I mean several hundreds. We need to be the editor and the press as well. Now the question is how do I share these photos? One way is to create a slideshow. But I wanted something in print that the kids can flip thru years later. As a digital scrapbooker, putting in a photo album with several prints does not appeal aesthetically to me. Plus if you do hand journaling, it is lot of work to make a duplicate. And no one wants to flip thru hundred of photos. And scrapping over 100 layouts is just too tedious.

I wanted to print these in a photo book, something I can do quickly. So I started looking around for photo book print services. I made a list of the following and read reviews.

My publisher: I have used them before. I have printed about 35 pages. The cost is under $50. You can download their software, and if you are a costco customer, there is a discount. Cons: I wasnt't thrilled with the quality of print. The colors looked too saturated. May be ok for landscapes, but skin tones did not look good. Their software was ok, but no options to add text. Last time, I had to create all my layouts myself to fit 9x12 in Photoshop.

Shutterfly: Same as My publisher. Similar quality. With so many photos, shutterfly was not an option for a book this large and for the price/quality. Their square format books however interest me. I am not a fan of linen cover windowed books that shutterfly or My publisher offers. Side note- Shutterfly has good scrapbook backgrounds for the general crowd. As I am scrapbooker myself I like to design my own pages and the putting photos on a scrapbook paper background is too limiting/ not my style. I like to use several elements and designs to mimick traditional scrapbooks for my scrapbook layouts.

PhotoWorks: This would be my closest tie. Photoworks has custom sleeve so you could print your design, or photo on the cover which looks like a professional coffee table book. Now the part I don't like is the software. The book needs to be designed online. While this looks like a convenience at first, trying to upload my photos and design online is just a waste of time. I have to sit there at my computer while it processes after every command. The idea is that you can share this book, and a relative could probably replace a few pages and order the book for themselves, but this is not practical. I'd rather quickly design and upload and let it take its time uploading.

Lulu: While some pros use it , it has limited templates or none. You have to design and upload a pdf. Think about the size of uploading one extremely large pdf file. And the time it takes to custom design all your pages.

Other things that I came across were kodak gallery but they are all similar to My Publisher.

Blurb: It is the winner for me. It is also most affordable. The software booksmart can be downloaded so you are working off your harddrive which is always faster while you are working at it. It seems to be the option for pages over 50. The software was easy to use. Athough I have to exit and get back a couple of time when the number of pages were more than 30. Good thing is you can load all your images, and drop them in selected templates. It has options (where the used image is flagged and out of your browser view) so you can keep track of what images you already used in
your pages, and just keep dragging the ones that are still on the file list.

It has options to add captions. Though the templates may be some what limited, I liked the clean look. I completed a book of 140 pages, some pages full bleed. Custom cover and back design. This would have taken me like 10 days if I need to custom create it in photoshop. I like the convenience of moving things around. I created the book in a couple of days. Now I can upload it, I know this is going take a long time, but you can click upload and then go to bed. Other ideas for using blurb is to print your journal, or create a cookbook or whatever. May be I am turning out to be a blurbarian.. You can even print all your blog stuff into a blurb book.

Blurb made it possible for me to be able to print over 350 photos in one book, without spending too much time. I am yet to see the print quality.. That is for another time.