Photobooks

A few weeks ago, PhotoBox offered a 2-for-1 deal for hardcover photobooks in conjunction with Mother’s Day. I love photobooks. I think they are a much, much better way to keep and present your photos than traditional photo albums. It’s not that easy to find a photo album in shops nowadays anyway.

With digital cameras we take so many photos all the time but we never get around to printing them. My mother used to keep reminding me to print the photos of my IIUM graduation, my time in the United States, etc. but I never did until I lost them all when my hard drive died. It was a painful lesson. So I keep backup copies now. And I’ve discovered photobooks. I love photobooks. Did I say that already? I did!

So I spent the next few days in front of the computer creating our two photobooks. I’d already had for some time an idea for one photobook—our 2010 album. The hardest part was to pick which among the 1000+ photos we had taken last year to put in the photobook, and then arranging them nicely. It took longer than I expected, but in the end I really like what I had done, YAY! For the second photobook I decided to make another album of our wedding. As a matter of fact, we already have two awesome ‘official’ wedding albums from Shutterspeak, plus one photobook Afi made previously, but we thought why not one more. :D I did the second photobook over two days in time for the offer deadline, though later it turned out they extended the deadline for another week.

Apart from PhotoBox, an online photo printing company, there are two other companies I knew of that offer photobook printing service online: Snapfish and Jessops. Snapfish is similar to PhotoBox but owned by HP, while Jessops is a UK photographic equipment retailer. While researching for this entry, I found out that the CEWE photobook sold by Jessops is actually made by German company CEWE Color.

I prefer PhotoBox over the other two companies because it has the best design tool. You do everything online. There are templates you can choose and drop your photos into. I really like that PhotoBox allows you to resize and move your photos around, which Snapfish doesn’t. However, Jessops requires you to download and install a program on your computer, which I don’t like at all. I don’t need another software on my PC. Alternatively, you can let upload all your photos and have them design the photobook for you, but where’s the fun in that?

Our two photobooks arrived last Tuesday.