Now that I live in a grand age where all of my pictures live on Flickr and I rarely print them, I worry about what will happen if for some reason they all disappeared. So in the interest of preservation (because everyone will want to know about my life in the future, I'm sure of it) I decided to have a book of our photos made.
Flickr has tons of photo partners that you can print through but all of my experiences with online javascript photo album creation tools were frustrating. They are slow, buggy and limiting. I had tried QOOP originally for our wedding pictures and had a softcover album printed but the print quality was just okay and the layout options were minimal.
I eventually found Blurb which is a downloadable (for Windows AFAIK) tool that actually worked quite well. They offered a number of different layouts, formats, sizes and bindings so I figured I'd try them. Here are the results:
I chose the image wrap cover (no dust jacket) and in retrospect it was a bad decision as it's the only drawback to an otherwise great book. It appears washed out and is jarringly different from the quality printing of the actual photos (which turned out wonderfully):
As 284 pages it was around $160 (roughly $.50/page) which might seem bit on the expensive side but I think it's actually quite reasonable. How much would it have cost me 15 years ago to shoot, design and print my own 11 x 13 hard cover book?
Blurb. Check'em out.
