Saturday, July 20, 2013

Story-telling in photobooks





I like creating photobooks, even though they are such a pain and a total time-sink.  But I get to tell a story when I'm creating photobooks.  Since I always arrange the photos and layout manually for every single page and every single picture, it's about how I want to portray that story in a way I think flows well and looks nice.

I just created a 20 page 8.5x11 photobook for free with shutterfly.com using their online flash program.  I got a coupon from shutterfly facebook for that photobook. ~$10 shipping is the net cost. The book's full price is $39, but why would I pay $39?  I would rather wait for good sales from MyPublisher for 8.5x11 with 70 pages for ~$40.

The story of this photobook is Un's ordination ceremony in Thailand, and a few following days as a monk.


It took me about 2 hours till I placed the order, arranging, squeezing pics in 20 pages, and deciding which pics to put etc. My overall experience creating this photobook with shutterfly is positive. Their online tool is easy enough to use; 20 pages is small enough to do page allocation on the fly and not much page-swapping required. The only down side is you can't scale or crop the pictures easily. There is a "customize" link to do that, but not obvious.


The only thing I'm worried is picture quality.  After mypublisher.com photobooks, I'm committed to mypublisher. I am a royal customer of theirs now (if not for free from shutterfly now), even though mypublisher is ~10 times more painful than shutterfly.

Can't wait to get this photobook in the mail.


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