Memory Book Publishers

[Ric Cisson]

I believe this question was asked earlier in the forum. I get many inquiries from customers as to how good some of these publishers are. I was wondering if anyone had tried Publishers such as My Publisher Bookmaker or Snapfish or Cameo Styles etc. I am trying My Publisher, myself, to see what they are capable and what quality. Anyone have any new experiences with memory book publishing? Thanks in advance.:)

[GaryK]

Ric

This is not exactly what you asked. :)

My sister did a few up at Christmas time from Future Shop of all places. More of a photo album type of thing. They turned out surprisingly well. At a reasonable price.
A few of the photos seemed dull or something, but to be honest, I know she didn't read the size recommendations before she posted them all. Also they were all from different cameras and people.
I would have like to have tried to follow the rules/recommended sizes etc. and paid a bit more attention to which ones she edited online vs. the unedited ones but of course at Christmas who has time for anything.

The site format was a little weird (not intuitive for me) but it looks like you could actually upload pictures all year, arrange them at your leasure, and print the book when you are done

[kayser]

Hi Ric,

I've made both larger Photobooks and Snapbooks from Shutterfly (i think thery named them that on purpose so Snapfish had to call theirs something else :))

The Snapbooks are more informal and spiral bound and good as fun but not too pricy gifts. I've given them to people who have come to visit or people we've visited as memories of the trip. They're easy to make and you can do captions or just a full page picture.

The photo books are nice because you can do several pictures on a page and you can adapt the layouts per page. I did one of those for my parents after their 50th anniversary party, and they really liked it.

One of the things that ?Brice? mentioned earlier was about VividPics; it's an automatic color correction thing they do for pictures that isn't really helpful for pictures you've already worked with in PSE.

[Ric Cisson]

Thanks Kay and Gary,

My customers look for quality, I have looked into Shutterfly spiral book and they are just as cheap looking as my customers portray them...having not tried these sites, and I am currently getting an order ready for My Publisher, for their leather and linen hard bound to compare. It is so hard to know what to expect from these, and still be able to recommend a source to clients. Cameo Styles looks to be pretty good quality. Also ease of processing order is of importance too. I think most of my customers are looking for a smooth workflow through to processing the order for the memory book, I don't think that they are so much concerned with corrections or what not, because they tend to give us that responsibility in preparing their images/files and then they take them home to do whatever it is they intend to do with their files.

I know this group is pretty open with their experiences, so I value any input on this subject. It is just one more area in our day to day operations that having knowledge and experience to talk about this subject to our customers sets us apart from the "Box Stores".;)

[Lynn Dryer]

I have used Mypublisher on two subjects and am very pleased. I used one as a memory book and another for flowers and landscapes. Both had linen covers.

Lynn

[GaryK]

Ric

The ones my sis got from FS were linen bound and the had a cover picture in the middle.. very nice look.

I'm not pushing them, I was just truly surprised at the presentation all things considered. Mind you, I guess you want to keep your customers away from the bi,g "no service" stores.. understandable and comendable :)

[Ric Cisson]

Gary,

You are correct on the "no service" point. I just submitted my order to My Publisher and I am going to submit the same files to Cameo Style as well. I just learned of another one out in San Francisco, Mementos Press. One of my customers very high on them.

So as you can understand, looking for a certain standard for my customer base. ;)

[Ric Cisson]

Lynn,

Did the Linen bound books look durable?:)

[Woodmaker]

I have used Viovio and it was very easy and turned out great. I did the hard bound book 8.5X11 and gave it to my wife for Christmas and boy was she surprised.. The price was very reasonable also..

Tom

[frank abramonte]

I have used Viovio for printing 7 different books and found the quality excellent. The price is more than reasonable. The service good.
They offer book templates and covers in various sizes and textures, and allow you to build your book from uploaded photos to your gallery. They also offer mini books.
They can also print books from files completed at home and uploaded as JPEG and PDF files.
Most bad printed photos are caused by not correcting your photos before uploading them. The printer can only print what you supply.

Because of their low prices you can order a book of minimum pages to proof your photos. Gang up all your photos in reduced sizes on as few pages as possible.

I always create my books at home in a word processing program, import my photos and uploading the completed book. This gives me more flexibility with type and layout then what templates offer.

http://www.viovio.com/wiki/Photo+Books
hope this helps.
PS:I use QuarkXPress and CS2 which allows me more latitude than what PSE does, but you should be able to get the same results using PSE.

[stories4tomorrow]

I am a Heritage Makers consultant. They make great quality hardbound and stitched books in many sizes. You can create your layouts in photoshop and save them as jpegs, upload them to their site and publish or you can sign up for their Premier membership and create your layouts within their system. With a premier account, they provide Scrapgirls digital artwork to create your layouts with. Here is a link www.stories4tomorrow.com. Let me know if you have any questions! Jenny

[kimh]

A co-worker of mine and I ordered books from m-pix, my publisher and darn, there were a couple more and I forget which. They were all the hardbound books. The least quality was the mpix. Even though I like there printing the best. The best was mypublisher. The others were comparable to the my publisher though. M-pix had nice pages but the binding was bit flimsy. That was our opinion though.
HTH
Kimh