Photobooks - TOGs (and others) advice welcome

I don't know about high end but I have had a few from photobox that have been pretty good quality.

To be honest i think there all similar, Have you had a look at bobbooks?

One thing I can say is stay the heck away from Blurb. The print quality is disgraceful and if you want a book without a Blurb logo it's about £10+ to remove it.

The book I received even had a white spot on one of the images where the paper was contaminated and the book had a huge staple in the binding holding the pages together.

Cheap, but not worth it.

I have ordered a book from Photobox though and that is due for delivery in the next week or so but already the way in which it took forever to upload the images is reassuring as some resize them meaning a degradation in quality.

I've ordered these books not for customers but to see for myself whether they are worth recommending to clients over my official Albums made by Graphistudio as not everyone takes an album due to the price of them.

I'll update the thread once I've received the book.

Hi,

I have used Photobox for things like collages, prints and a canvass for a friend. I found them to be very good for the price and never had any issues. I've not used their photobooks before so I couldn't comment on them. However, as Chris says their FTP site is very good and lets you choose between products that will be printed less than A3 for speed of upload and bigger than A3 for quality. I'm also pretty sure that they have a no quibble policy so that if you're not happy with anything they will re-print it for you (you might need to check this on their site). The other thing is that Photobox by default has colour corection turned on. So if you have a CD of properly colour corrected images you might want to turn this off. I would always order one quick test print just to make sure you are happy with the colour settings before ordering a whole book.

My wife did me a photobook present for me a couple of years ago using fotoinsight. This is ok, again for the price, the image quality is good and colour rendition not bad. The pages are a bit too glossy for my liking but this might be an option you can select during the design process. The thing I quite like about this is that the pages are 'gripped' between the covers by a metal clip rather than glued in to a binding.

I have also used professional photobooks from a variety of suppliers. These are, of course a different league both in terms of the quality of the product and the photographic printing. Alot of them do 'lay flat' coffee table books which I really like as you can turn it to a spread and leave it without the pages bowing up. Also they have a lot more design options like being able to print across the spine, numerous cover options and parent books - but of course this all costs!

Hope this helps

I'm interested in this too, as I'm planning to put together a guestbook with our engagement photos. I was going to use Blurb as I find it very user friendly, but after Chris' comments, maybe not! Having said that, I wasn't terribly impressed with the photobook I got for my sister from Photobox either, but that was a good few years ago so perhaps the quality has improved since then?!

Please do update us Chris, this is something I want to do too and had been toying with getting them from photobox

My friend put together her own wedding album online using the photobook option from this site -

http://www.photocreator.co.uk/home.aspx

I have seen her photobook and it was lovely, the pages and photos were very good quality and it was done in a hard backed book style.

I used photo box recently to put together a photo collage for our wedding and it was fanastic

Will do.

Re: Blurb, there's a lot of comments to be found on them. They always reprint if need be but for me they should get it right first time and the quality issues for me are minor ones to overcome, yet they keep occuring.

The source files from Blurb were about 40mb (it was a boudoir book) yet the images uploaded in just a few minutes. This suggests they are resized on submission. I used all the premium options too and wasn't happy.

Another reason for ordering from photobox is to at least show couples what they are like to order from. I prefer to take and edit lovely pictures. Albums for me are messy and sometimes take longer to put together and produce than the photos themselves.

I've also had books (and a diary) from photobox and have been happy with. I planned to use them for our wedding album

As Chris said, it takes ages to upload but I have been happy with the end results

These appear to be the best of the bunch. Never used them myself although have always heard decent comments about them compared to others.

Peter

MyPublisher in the site my photogrpaher recommended to us. Is it a problem that it's US?

Thanks all for your advice. I think I'll steer clear of Blurb now!

Chris, I'd be grateful for your professional opinion on Photobox, when you receive your album.

We have used Bob Books for several photo books over the past 2 years. Fantastic quality and their software is very easy to use to upload photos and do your own layouts etc but at the same time knowing that the picture quality will be good.

Can't recommend them enough.

I have to agree with Chris about Blurb. I had a book back where the photo was not aligned and there was a slight white space between the photo and the border, and I checked the book over and over before ordering. Whether you choose premium paper or not the paper looks the same to me. The guy that started Blurb has left and started his own book company http://www.ubyubooks.com/ but I have not used them.

Ok, literally 10 minutes ago I got my book from Photobox.

I was a bit excited tbh because until now I've never been able to comment on them properly.

First impressions are good. I went for the all singing all dancing options like the outersleeve and removal of the photobox logo (£5) from it.

Going through it now I will give it a score of 'OK'.

It's properly bound, the internal images are good for the price and the colours of the internal pages look pretty good in print.

The external cover is also good for the money.

But it's not great.

Fairly or unfairly I'm comparing this directly to Graphistudio albums which cost 6-7 times as much. But it's a wedding album and it should look good.

The photobox books feels and looks mass produced. The images to my eye are not 'as they should be' However everything is at an acceptable level which will suffice for most.

Graphistudio has the metallic laminated thick lay flat pages, the cover is luxurious and there is a price to pay for this.

Personally I would only recommend Photobox albums as gifts or parent books. But, Graphistudio can do parent books of the same size for not much more than this.

I probably would even go so far as to say I wouldn't use them to place in venues as examples of my work.

But, I'm a photographer, my eye for detail is trained up and I know what's out there.

It's miles better than Blurb though, leaps and bounds ahead.

Bottom Line:

Is it worth the money? Certainly, without a doubt.

Is it a replacement for a Wedding Album? Nope

I'm going to order a few more from other suppliers....anyone want to throw some names at me?

Chris, they will all still be press printed,, you pretty much already knew it was never going to be a product that could stand up well against a product we as professionals would use. I don't think we can be objective, at least I know I couldn't, lol. Save your money

Teri, one of the reasons I'm ordering them is to show couples who want to see my albums the difference between brands.

I see loads of posts on the internet forums saying how certain book makers are fab etc and who am I to critique them without seeing for myself.

A lot of couples want to make their own albums and often they suggest companies like photobox are 'just as good' based on what they've seen online. At least they will be able to see what they are getting before ordering and thus make an educated decision.

I'm not big on selling albums myself.

Thats a good idea Chris as as you say alot of people think pro albums aren't worth the money - I always use a Snapfish photobook as an example of quality. Never ever ever ever ever (could go on & on with the 'ever's!) use Snapfish for a photobook. I've never seen anything quite like it. The first one had several fuzzy images, the b&w was not b&w, they had stretched the photos to fit in wrong sized templates (and yes I did do it properly online) and lastly they had a smudge of ink about an inch long on every single page - so quality control isn't a strong point.

They did send me a new photobook (after making me pay to return to rubbish one) but everything was the same except for the ink smudge, aparently my photos uploaded like that! Apparently Snapfish talk out of their bottoms! ....phew sorry that turned into a rant, I do apologise! lol Oh that photobook cost me £70 so not really a bargain.

I take a huge amount of pleasure using it to sell my Loxely Albums ?