When I submitted my travel reviews at TripAdvisor, they sent me a coupon for a free 8″x8″ hardcover photo book containing 20 pages, worth US$29.99 at Shutterfly. All I had to do was to pay for shipping,
Looking up the shipping cost, it’d cost me US$7.99 to my friend’s address in the US where I’d be staying, so I decided to take up the offer to try out the quality of the prints.
It’s a bit strange, taking photos of your own photos in a photo book, so I’ll try and do the best I can describing my experience of creating the Photo Book and seeing the final thing in real life.
Now, when you first select the Photo Book, it tells you that you get 20 pages included in the basic price of US$29.99.
20 pages sounds like a lot, but what they mean by 20 pages, is 20 sides of a leaf of a page. Therefore, for one leaf, that’s 2 pages. That doesn’t give you a lot of pages at all, especially when you’re trying to fit in nearly 2 and a half months of travel.
Doing some quick mental sums, this means each side of the page costs US$1.4995. Okay, I cheated, I used a calculator.
Additional pages cost more at US$1.
You can see how the cost of a Photo Book can add up.
Based on cost alone, I don’t recommend making a Photo Book. Unless you want to make a custom-made coffee table book. But why would you want that?
I’ve read of scrapbook-ing enthusiasts who love to use Shutterfly’s Photo Book service, but I think that takes away the scrapbook-iness of a scrapbook when you use this.
Photo Prep and Layout
Attempt 1: When you first use the Photo Book service, it is reassuring to use their Storyboard tool that automatically lays out all your photos for you. However, Storyboard selects templates with 2-4 photos per page and, my first try resulted in over 50 pages.
The frame for each photo, I discovered to my horror, ignored the size ratio of my photos. My photos are 4×6″ and were being cropped off in strange ways at the sides.
You can adjust the area of the crop, but I just found it too frustrating.
I deleted all the photos I’d spent hours uploading.
Attempt 2: I read up on how to format photos and started all over again.
Again, I used the Storyboard tool.
It was better, but not quite what I wanted.
I found that you couldn’t add text where you wanted. You also could not move the text boxes to a better spot so that it wouldn’t mar your photo.
Although there were plenty of templates to choose from, none could be modified in any way. I found this very restrictive.
With the loose layout, you can see how your pages get taken up.
Attempt 3: I searched for some people who had experience in creating Photo Books and I discovered plenty of people who do scrapbooks and print them out in Photo Books. I realised that most of them do not use the templates at all. But they’re real experts, going into the nitty gritty of gutter space and so on. They even have layouts that span two pages, which is really hard to align.
I didn’t even want to go that far.
I knew that the maximum space of the book was 8×8″ so I created a canvas in Photoshop Elements of 8×8″ and laid out my photos on that.
For me, this was the best way to put a lot of photos on one page.
I took a risk, not knowing how small the photos would look, cramming so many in a space. But I think it turned out pretty good.
Furthermore, I could get out of having a printed black background for all my pages. And, I kept all the ratios of my photographs.
About the front cover (first photo on this page): I wanted the photo to go all the way to the spine, but it didn’t work out using the template as it tried to crop my photo in a funny way. So I tried my 8×8″ canvas method. As you can see, that failed too.
I did like the multiple photo template I used for my Back Cover.
But I find again, it wastes a lot of space, and I would use it sparingly.
Print and Photo Quality
The colours reproduced on the book are okay. A bit too red for my liking.
However, for a photo that I had to up the exposure for, the photo turned out pretty grainy. I also could have improved on the contrast and made the blacks a little blacker (see the tux).
I like the white paper that they book’s opening pages start with. You can see a bit of it in the photo above.
The actual printed pages are of a pretty good quality, but I don’t like this type of shiny-matt paper. If you are the type with oily fingers, you will definitely leave prints on the black parts of the page.
The cover of the book was shiny and I felt made the book feel cheap.
Delivery
The book came in a specially made Shutterfly book box that kept the book well protected.
Conclusion
It was quite nice to see the book all done up, but the feeling was rather underwhelming.
First of all, 20 pages makes a very thin book. It was like reading a hardcover children’s book – you know how it is – the covers added together is thicker than the book itself. Super unsatisfying.
And when it comes down to it, I think the cost is rather prohibitive.
At the time that I checked out the book, the additional pages were going at a discount at US$0.80 a page.
In total, I paid US$9.99 after taxes. This was a bit less than S$15 when the credit card bill came.
Now remember, this bill only includes the shipping and two additional pages.
If this had been the actual price of the book, then I’d say go for it, if you like thin books.
But, if you add the US$29.99 price of the actual book, the total price would be US$39.98, shipped to a US address. Almost US$40 for a Photo Book of amateur photos.
I wouldn’t do this again, unless I got a free book offer.
Fortunately, there are ways to get a free Photo Book. Just Google.
But then I’d have to think about it, because I don’t think 22 pages (11 leaves) makes a nice book. It’d have to be at least 50 pages. So that’s an additional US$30 for the additional pages.
And seeing how it adds up, free book and all, I still wouldn’t do it again.
Well, maybe if it’s fifty cents an additional page… maybe. Unlikely, but maybe.
(To view my Photo Book, you can go click here.)