Photobook - MyPublisher

I am on a quest to try out all of the photobook companies out there. My photographer's package didn't come with an album, so I am planning on designing my own. Ideally I would like to find a flush-mount album with metallic pages, but it is difficult for brides to do this because many album companies will only work with professional photographers. In case I'm not able to do this, I'm planning on doing a "coffee-table" book, but I'm on the search for the best company to use. I've decided to do mini-albums at each of the various companies to test ease-of-use, layout options, price, and quality.

The first company I tried was MyPublisher. They offer a 20% discount if you go through the Costco website. When I went to their webpage, they had a buy-one-get-one-free offer for new customers (but it didn't work in conjunction with the 20% off). I decided to take advantage of this offer and made a parents' album for our parents.

SOFTWARE: I downloaded the software and decided to go with the "deluxe" book, which is 15" wide by 11.5' high. It is printed on premium 182-pound high-gloss archival-quality paper, which is 75% heavier and thicker than the best paper used by any competitor (according to their website). I would suggest narrowing down the pictures you want to use for your album before adding them to the software, as it can take a while. Once it is loaded, all of your pictures are shown at the top of the window and the book is shown below. You simply select the template you want to use then drag the pictures onto the page. The software is pretty intuitive and easy to use. It ran a little slow on my computer, though. It took me almost a full day to create my book.

LAYOUTS: The layouts are okay. There are nice, simple layouts organized by number of pictures per page and whether or not you want to add text. What it was missing is the ability to easily create panoramic spreads (where a picture spans two pages) and the option to adjust opacity and use your own pictures as background images. These are two options I really wanted. Of course I could always create the layout I wanted in Photoshop and simply upload the layout as a single image, but that's just a little more work and time than I wanted to spend on this project.

PRICE: I thought the album was a bit pricey. My deluxe album was 66 pages and came out to $104.49. I got another copy of the album for free using the offer provided on the MyPublisher webpage. Shipping via FedEx was $14.98. It came out to about $60 per album.

QUALITY: I thought the quality of the album was excellent. The pages felt nice and the print quality came out clear (make sure you use high-resolution images, especially with such a big book). The book is big! It is really nice, especially for the full-page spreads I created, but might be a bit big for my taste (disclaimer: I love cute, tiny things -- I'm still searching for a small 4"x4" album that I saw sampled at The Wedding Cafe).

Okay, enough talking. Click below to flip through the book I created!

Click to view

Much Mahalos

I made my own photo thank you cards and got them printed at Costco.  $14.99 for 50 cards and $5 for each additional set of 25...the best deal in town!  They were ready the next day and came complete with envelopes.  This is actually take 2.  The first design I created had a black border around the whole card, but it didn't print right.  Luckily Costco took them back, no problem.

I'm currently working on writing the thank you notes on the back, and it is taking l-o-n-g.  I had really wanted to start them on the airplane of our mini-moon when I was still in wedding-planning-super-ambitious-mode, but since I wanted photo cards, I decided to wait.  Now I got my photo cards but lost my ambition.  I just keep reminding myself that having to write a lot of thank you cards shows how lucky we are to receive so many gifts and have so many people celebrate with us.  I've got about 25 done...125 to go!