Belle Photos

I shoot and shoot all these fun photos, but then they don’t do anything besides eat up space on my harddrive; well that’s about to change. I’m on a little mission to find the best photobook to display my photos because let’s face it, there just isn’t enough wall space to hang them all up in the house. So, other than just printing them out and stuffing them in an old album, I thought I’d try to find a resource that would display my photos in a way that I’d like and still be cost effective, whatever that means.

The first up to bat was Mac’s iPhotobook. I went with the medium sized softcover, which cost me around $17 to make. I think normally they’re around $10, but I added a couple of pages to mine and then the shipping charges brought it up to $17. I chose to go with the medium size book because I wanted to have one of my photos wrap around the cover. The cover to the hardback books they make I think look a bit tacky: it’s a solid color with a window to one of your photos. I went with the medium size so I could customize the cover a bit more.

First impressions: what great quality! The photos show well on the book’s glossy paper, which, of course, was important seeing as it is a photobook. But man, it’s a lot smaller and thinner than I thought it would be. I guess 6 x 8 seemed much larger in my mind. But I think it’s a fun little book, and it was fun working with the layout in iphoto to make the pages.

The good: I used iphoto to create the book, which meant it was super easy to select the photos I wanted in the photobook and then place them in the layout. If I messed up at all, it was easy to switch out the photo for another one. It was quite easy to create, which means I’ll probably do more. The quality of the book was great; I really liked how the photos could be printed across the whole page and the overall design and layout was quite pleasing. I’d be happy to show the photobook to any of my friends and family. The cost wasn’t too high either. I figure if I have 20 photos printed, then the cost would be around the same price as the photobook, so I think it’s a good deal.

The bad: because of its size, it seems that the photos get lost a bit in the layout. If the photos are near the center, then they’ll probably be seen a lot less then the photos placed on the outside of the book. So next time, I’ll put the best photos towards the outside. Also, I wish you could move the position of the photo once you place it in the layout in iphoto. You can choose where to place the photo, but you can’t choose which part of the photo to display; the software automatically crops the photo to fit into the layout. Perhaps you can move the photo, but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.

Would I do it again? You bet. I think the quality was excellent and the cost wasn’t too high. The only thing I would do differently would be to get the larger size photobook and maybe change it to the hardcover. I’ll try those out next time and see if they make that big of a difference. But overall, it was well worth the money.