Photo Books

I have used Shutterfly and although it's cheap and relatively easy, you get what you pay for. I have recently discovered Heritage Makers (newmexicomemories.com) and they have awesome storybooks, cards, posters, etc. and everything is completely customizable, whereas the templates in Shutterfly and others and limited and locked. There are thousands of templates to chose from or you can design one from scratch using over 45,000 pieces of artwork (papers, alphabets and embellishments!) It's amazing!

I just made a photobook last month for my boss' mom using photoworks.com. It is a very easy to use website with a lot of options for layouts, design, # of pics per page, colors, fonts, etc. They have lots of different types of photobooks to choose from. I ordered the personalized 8 x 11 hard back book and put a ton of pics in it, I think it was 45 pages, total was originally going to be about $80 with that many pages but they gave me a good discount and I only paid $65 and that was with 2 day shipping. I think the book starts at 20 pages for about $30 and it is $1 per page to add more. She loved the book I made for her! It came out really nice. Photoworks.com was a great website to use to make a photobook!

I love Shutterfly! Very user friendly, great choices, and good prices. I can usually find discount codes online also. Once you sign up with them (it's free) they'll even randomly email you coupon codes for free items or discounted items. I've ordered 5 photo books, several calendars (for myself and gifts), cards, and numerous prints and have never been disappointed!

I just have two cents to throw in about the good prices part. =0) Before I ever buy something online, I go to www.retailmenot.com and enter in the website and check for discount codes. I can honestly tell you that I rarely EVER pay full price for anything I purchase online. If retailmenot doesn't have a valid code, I will just google..."discount code for www.........com" and go through the results. It really is amazing how much money you can save that way!! Granted, it takes time to get good deals, but it's so worth it. Like yesterday........I purchased 4 pairs of crocs and 4 jibbitz for my kids. I went to retailmenot.com and found a 10% discount code. Someone had also posted on there that if you sign up for their email notifications, that they will email you an instant 20% off code. So, I did that. And within 5 minutes, they had emailed me my 20% off code. AND...the website let me enter BOTH discount codes for a total of 30% off! The jibbitz were free. Two pairs of crocs were already on sale and my codes made them even cheaper! Shipping was also free! I saved SO MUCH money on that purchase! Anyway......sorry about that, but I totally thrive on discounts and coupons. =0) Another great site that I frequent is frugalcouponliving.com. They always have GREAT deals and info. Lots of free stuff. =0)

I would check out shutterfly. Not only for books but just ordering regular prints of photos. I have used them for years and have been very happy.

Enjoy.

If you are looking for affordable...Walgreens does photobooks that are cute.

Creative Memories has beautiful books. StoryBook photo books are printed on acid-free, lignin-free, buffered paper. Hardcovers are carefully stitch-bound, NOT glued together. They are of utmost quality.

On the website, get inspired with beautiful TONS of digital project ideas at the "Project Center." In addition, find digital classes and tutorials, tips and techniques at the "Help Zone."

Go to: www.mycmsite.com/marycluley then click on "Digital Center" and you will LOVE what you see!

Good luck! Glad you are taking the time to do this!

Heritage Makers has beautiful hard bound storybooks that allow you to use your photos, text, quotes, and over 45,000 pieces of digital art to design your books. You can also create other projects such as invitations, calendars, playing cards, canvas prints, jewelry and much more. We also have a template gallery with over 3,100 templates. You have unlimited photo storage and can also share your photo albums. It's all web-based so you don't have to download any software at all and can access it 24/7 on any computer with internet access. Feel free to check out my website at www.DesignAStorybook.com. I would be happy to talk with you more about it and help you get started!

I used BLURB to create books for my wedding-they are great coffee table books and the website is really user friendly:
http://www.blurb.com/
Not sure how they are price-wise but I thought it was fair-recommended to me by my wedding photographer. Have fun!

I was wondering the same thing last night when I decided that I was going to make a photo book for Mother's Day. I came across this website where a guy does a very thorough comparison of a bunch of photo books: http://www.digitalhomethoughts.com/news/show/97676/the-gr...
I eventually decided to go with adoramapix.com. I haven't received my finished book yet but the website was pretty easy to use. I have seen some nice books from shutterfly also and they have great discount promotions pretty often.

I love kodak gallery. You don't have to have a kodak camera to use it and I think the books come out way better than the ones from shutterfly. Good prices I think and great quality and the website is very easy to use.

Hi! I have not personaly ordered any books myself, but there is a website ( www.freebies4mom.com ) and I have seen many offers for free or low cost photo books! I'm not sure the quality but people have posted some good reviews about the product they get! Hope this helps! God bless and good luck!
J.

Shutterfly, OR.. find someone (like me) who makes scrapbooks for other people and have them do one for you.
Shutterfly uses matte paper.

Haven't read other's posts so I may be repeating. I used the site Mixbook.com for a photobook recently and loved it. I used to be a big time scrapbooker but just don't have the time any more. I also dabbled in digital scrapbooking for awhile but again, no time! Mixbook has books that are very scrapbook like and you can do quite a bit of editing. You can add the embellishments where ever you like, move them around, design your own pages etc... much more flexible than sites like Shutterfly.

Shutterfly.com

Great prices, several types to choose from, easy to do, takes minutes!

I use Shutterfly and I really like it. It allows me to easily maintain a photo web site that I can share with friends and family. You can set it up so that anyone who "joins" your group can get emails every time you upload new photos. You can also upload videos or link to videos you put on YouTube. The site will automatically create a photo album for you when you upload pictures which you can buy as is, or you can create your own. I have made two so far and working on my third, they are easy to do. I make one for each year of my son's life and for special trips or occasions. You can also post the books so that other people in your family can order them if they want. There are also tons of other great products on the site, and if you want pictures printed you can have them sent to your house or pick them up at Target. I highly recommend Shutterfly!

I'm a member of Walgreens.com and they send out coupon codes all the time and I ordered an 8.5"x11" custom cover photo book that was supposed to be 29.99 and I got it for 7.50 (+6.99 shipping). It came out better than I ever imagined and you got to lay everything out just how you wanted and there are tons and tons of backgrounds to choose from and if a picture is not of good enough quality, it won't let you add it to the book. Took me a little while to learn what I was doing but it was very user friendly and the book came like 4 days later. I ordered 2 more for my mom and my mother-in-law for Mother's Day! :)

Shutterfly. I decided to go with one of the bigger names even though they can be more expensive than others because I wanted to do one every Christmas of my son's year. I wanted them all to be the same and hopefully not have to find a new place to do them at any point. I have never used snapfish, but seen their finished products. They were really nice too, but a little more expensive than shutterfly. Shutterfly does great coupons and sales around each holiday, I just always make sure I do my ordering when there is a coupon. I have heard horrible things about Kodak's quality. I have seen a Heritage Makers book just the other day and it was nice.

I have used mypublisher.com and picaboo.com. Both have great quality books. Picaboo is more expensive, but i had a coupon for a free one. Also mypublisher does free books usually for yor first order. I have done a book for very year of my girls life. I cherish these booKS!

I've made my fair share of photobooks thru various sites and I prefer Shutterfly. I've made the majority of my books there and they are always consistant; with shipping, quality, and prices.

Of all the sites I've used, I would not recommend using MyCanvas. The book looked great, but for the extra price it was just as nice as Shutterfly's. They don't have as great of a selection for book styles, and to upgrade the change in book styles is outragious in price. But the worst part of my experience is that my book took over a month and a half to get to me. I called several times and I was told EVERY time that "Oh yeah, we know the order...our manager is taking care of that down at the press now." Needless to say, I didn't get it in time to give it to my mother as a gift from my daughters for her birthday.

American Greetings has a website called photoworks. You can create and edit beautiful books. I did one last year for my hubby's first father's day and boy did he love it! He and my DD look at it constantly. Very professional looking and great quality for the price. Also, they are always running specials. I got mine for 20% just for signing up for email. You could always search for photoworks coupon codes too..there's always tons out there! Good Luck!

http://www.photoworks.com/

I've heard good things about Blurb, but have never used it for myself. I like Snapfish and Shutterfly. I've made most of my books on Snapfish, but both websites send out coupons all the time. In fact both of them have special Mother's Day pricing right now and I think they are both buy one get one free.

The one good thing about Shutterfly's books is that they use a feature called 'storyboard'. It enables you to place all your pictures on a mock story board and then it adds them to the pages for you. You still get to pick which pictures to use, etc. (and you can change the actual format of the page when you're done if you don't like the one it picked) but it's so much easier to lay it out like that first, instead of just looking at one page at a time.

We have two, 1 8x8 and 1 12x12 from shutterfly and I love them. They run specials on them sometimes too and you can usually find a code for free shipping. Photos all look great, have to make sure your quality is good enough if you are going to blow up to full 12x12 page size, they have recommendations for how many MB your picture needs to be to print what size. Friend and family really like looking through them and the quality too.

check out lulu.com

they're fast and reasonably priced if you design your own stuff.

I've used both Snapfish and Shutterfly for photo books and they turn out great. Both are very easy to use. I think Shutterfly might be slightly better for online layout tools and also output a slightly higher quality product, but they are also slightly more expensive. I don't think you can go wrong with either of them. The couple of times (over the past 8 years!) that I have been unhappy with my results from Shutterfly they have totally redone the print job and sent me a new (improved) version for free, no questions asked. There is a lot to be said for customer service! I don't know about Snapfish in that regard.

I use mypublisher.com. The books have been amazing and very easy to create. The last one had 90 pictures (24 pages) and I completed it in less than 3 hours with descriptions and got it on special for $20. Very easy to use and change. They offer periodic discounts. You can get a discount anyday if you have a Costco card and go through costco.com photo.

I love that I can share them via e-mail for out of town family and now you can post them on facebook to share with friends.