I ended up ordering my photo book through flickr using the qoop printing service. I had originally wanted to do a minibook which would put one picture on a page, but that ended up being $50ish per book. So I ended up choosing the photobook, with a layout of four photos per page. It took about a week for the book to arrive. The printing, binding and stock were all perfect, qoop did a good job.
My only criticism is that by choosing the photobook over the minibook made the book only 20 pages. The book feels more like a magazine then a photo album.
With the purchase of my new all-in-one printer-scanner-copier I have started to scan a bunch of old photos from my families albums. Now that I am familiar with the scanner and my quality of scans has increased I want to print my first book of the old scans.
I use flickr to share my photos. They use QOOP to print books, posters, and all sorts of other stuff. I like the minibooks the best. Their size and style fits my tastes perfectly. I like the ease of which they let you assemble a book from an group of photos in your account. What I don’t like is that they sometimes mash your photos into their slots which results in images cropped the way you do not want them cropped. I want the images at the original size, not some new unknown size. They also make you use the same layout through out the book. I signed up for the QOOP beta program which might solve these issues, but I’ll have to wait and see.
Now I suppose I could crop the photos to fit their dimensions and re-upload them, but that seems like a lot more work for me. I am willing to layout the entire book myself in InDesign. This works the best, and would be simple with InDesign’s center content button.
So I went looking for a book printer that could do short 1 or 2 off runs. I found lulu.com. A self-publishing website that offers you the ability to upload a variety of formats and they will pre-flight it and print them on demand for you. They offer a variety of sizes, but they do not offer a decent stock for a photo book.
So my friend who is a print purchaser told me about SyNet Media, a company that he sometimes sends work to. They have a manual layout option That would allow me to get close enough to what I desire. There site seems to run a bunch of java applets and is not the easiest to work with. However I think it will end up being the best option available.
Do you have any experience with photo book printing? Have you used any service that you would recommend?
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