"How To" Guides > Sharing Images
Sharing Possibilities Expand With Digital Images
Online Photo Books
In addition to free storage and prints, many of the leading online printers offer photo book products as well. This allows you to incorporate your images into soft and hard covered books of varied sizes by using template layouts. These products are impressive, and have improved with advancing technology over the past couple of years. Since these companies are printers, they can simply print multiple images onto a page intended for a book rather than printing standard sized photos to organize into a traditional album format.
If you have photos already stored at one of the major online printers, you may use their photo book services out of convenience. However, if you have the same or other images on your computer or other storage media, you should not feel limited to one online printers. Many of the specialty photo book publishers allow you to download proprietary layout design software, and your only obligation to pay is when you upload the finalized layout and images and actually place the order.
Photo books are great to commemorate an event, trip, or era, and they are appreciated as thoughtful gifts. Illustrated family history books are also a common use of these services.
Photo books may initially appear costly. However, traditional albums are not cheap when you factor in the cost of developing/printing, the cost of the album, and often the need for additional album pages. Additionally, online photo book services offer you the flexibility to add customized captions and comments, and the final result is a long lasting and professional looking product.
Picaboo
is my choice for best photo books. Although not a broad product line printer, Picaboo's
emphasis on photo books has allowed it to offer the largest selection of
layouts, fonts, and other template choices. To create a Picaboo
photo book, you simply download their proprietary software, work at your
leisure, and only commit to pay when you place your order and upload the
final layout and images. If you visit the Picaboo site by using the link
to the right, take a look at the template
examples under "travel" and "heritage" to see how flexible and powerful
the layout and font choices can be.
Shutterfly.com, Snapfish.com by HP,
and Kodak Gallery
also offer photo book products. Their
offerings are all a good quality. If you do not have the need for the additional bells
and whistles found at Picaboo,
it
can be useful to explore the offerings of these as well.
The links to the left will take you
directly to their photo book descriptions, if you would like to compare.
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