I put together a wedding album on MyCanvas, and, call me crazy, but I'd like to see the actual printed pages in my hands before ordering them bound in a $400 leather cover and $50 slipcase.
Anyone know if MyCanvas will let you order unbound proof pages for a minimal fee before you spend lots of cash on a premium album?
Manbou, unfortunately we don't offer unbound pages at this time. However, we are working to offer proof books in the very near future.
I just signed up on the forum to give a big thumbs up for the MyCanvas calendars. I was going to use Shutterfly as I have in the past but decided to do a search here to see if Smugmug had any calendar options this year. I ordered and received a couple of sets of calendars for friends and family and I couldn't be more pleased with them.
I really appreciated the design flexibility - the possibilities are pretty much endless. It was a pleasure to be able to pull photos in from all my Smugmug galleries without having to upload the photos to another site. I found the controls to zoom, crop, rotate, frame, align, adjust translucency, format text, etc. to be both useful and pretty intuitive. I liked being able to duplicate a project so I could easily customize the calendars for different people without starting over from scratch.
The flash interface was a little slow and crashed the browser a few times on the old memory starved iMac I was using but quite OK on my new one (with 4 GB RAM!).
Processing and shipping was prompt and I appreciated the e-mail shipping notification. I liked that the calendars were individually shrink wrapped in plastic. The calendars themselves look great. Layouts and colors very accurate to what I saw on the screen. The photos look beautiful! My friends think I should sell the calendars (I am absolutely not a pro)!
Now that we're getting to the end of January, the option to begin the calendar with other months (as offered by Shutterfly) would be nice. And as others have mentioned, some way to mark the thumbnails to indicate images that have already been used would be helpful.
I have no relationship with these folks - just a happy customer.
Thanks for the feedback, blue-dolphin. We continue making changes and updates as quickly as we can and take into account the feedback we receive as we make those changes.
Just yesterday we rolled checkmarks for used photos and the ability to hide those used photos. When you mouse over a checkmark you can even see the pages in your project that the photo is used on.
We also rolled a color picker/eye dropper that allows you to select any color on the page to apply to text, text boxes and photo border colors. You will also be able to pick background colors the same way very soon.
Sometime in February we also plan to allow users to select a starting month for their calendars.
The branding is a total deal breaker for me. It is the entire last page with a direct link to the prices. I will not give this to the people who ordered it and will re-do the book at Blurb.
Paper quality is good but not up to par with Blurb's new premium paper offering. My last MPix book was very good as well. I would rate the print/paper quality on par with the Blurb standard paper.
The cover is nice, but I really am spoiled by the wrap around printed dust jackets. Sorry..but this plain simulated leather look just doesn't cut it for me.
It also seems very 'light'. I have a similar sized Blurb book that feels much heavier and sturdier. I would compare these books with those from ShutterFly, I have several from them for family fun shoots and sporting events and they look and feel very similar.
On a positive note I loved design interface, even with the minor bugs that I am sure will be fixed.
I will probably continue with Blurb books for now, especially with their new paper. I would like to see a sample of their high end books, will not spend money to test it out. I have been using Asuka for books in this price range and they sent me a sample book for free...I have since purchased several.
Just my opinion. A bit disappointed as I thought we were going to get some better quality than what we already had with Blurb and others...I see no reason to switch at this juncture.
Don't take this wrong, They are good quality but certainly not better.
Montec and other professionals, I think you'll be happy to hear that we will soon be launching the ability for professionals to turn off the branding page on printed books and calendars. In addition you will also be able to turn off the branding page and any references to pricing when sharing an electronic version of the project with a client.
Unfortunately, Montec, the cover you ordered is our entry level product and is not intended for the professional photography market. Please try not to judge all our books and covers by this particular product. We have flush mount and hinge books with much higher quality and heavier weight paper. These books include a range of cover options such as genuine leather. The flush mount books use a very heavy paper/card stock for the pages.
Orders take an excessive time to process...
Not to mention a bit pricey... I would hope service would be faster for the money. Guess I will look elsewhere for my poster sized photos...
Not to mention a bit pricey... I would hope service would be faster for the money. Guess I will look elsewhere for my poster sized photos...
Michael, sorry to hear you were disappointed with the pricing and processing times. For what it's worth, if you look closely at our prices and process times for our entry level books (nuba, bonded leather, etc...) I think you'll find that we are right in line with most other book publishers. In fact you'll see that our price per page in most cases is much lower than others. With regards to our premium books, yes you are correcct, they are more expensive and do take longer but they are individually hand crafted and you won't find them at other suppliers. With posters we use a high quality fujifilm at a high resolution. Many will use lower quality paper and resolution output to reduce the costs. We typically get great feedback on our final products. I hope this helps and that you'll consider using us but I certainly understand if you choose another option. There's lots to choose from out there.
Canadian MyCanvas users, I just want to give you a heads up. We're currently working on some tax/legal issues with orders from and shipments to Canada. I'm not going to go into details because the laws are confusing and I'm not a lawyer (although we've got many good ones working here) but the result is that we have temporarily suspended CA orders/shipments. This issue should be worked out shortly and we'll notify you once it is. I'm terribly sorry for any inconvenience this may cause some of you. Feel free to PM me or contact us for more details.
Got my wedding album recently from MyCanvas. It was one of the more expensive ones, so I expected the quality would be very high.
The overall binding and page thickness was fine. But I have some suggestions for improvements:
(1) I would like to see an option to choose coated pages (like with a textured matte or semigloss finish), maybe with gold coloring on the edges of the pages themselves. I have seen wedding albums with this kind of coating and edging and they look and feel "professional". The uncoated pages in my MyCanvas album, while nice and thick, have kind of a plain look and feel to them that doesn't really seem right for a wedding album.
(2) I would also like the cover photo to be somehow "embedded" in the cover and not just be pasted onto the cover material as a separate piece of paper.
(3) Please, give us more options to customize the fonts on the cover!
(4) Let ordinary customers have the option to exclude your advertising page. Charge me more, I don't care, but my wife and I shouldn't have to carry your advertising in our own family heirloom.
Thanks.
"[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Photography is often finding something cool and taking a picture of it."[/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] -- Ken Rockwell[/FONT]
Got my wedding album recently from MyCanvas. It was one of the more expensive ones, so I expected the quality would be very high.
The overall binding and page thickness was fine. But I have some suggestions for improvements:
(1) I would like to see an option to choose coated pages (like with a textured matte or semigloss finish), maybe with gold coloring on the edges of the pages themselves. I have seen wedding albums with this kind of coating and edging and they look and feel "professional". The uncoated pages in my MyCanvas album, while nice and thick, have kind of a plain look and feel to them that doesn't really seem right for a wedding album.
(2) I would also like the cover photo to be somehow "embedded" in the cover and not just be pasted onto the cover material as a separate piece of paper.
(3) Please, give us more options to customize the fonts on the cover!
(4) Let ordinary customers have the option to exclude your advertising page. Charge me more, I don't care, but my wife and I shouldn't have to carry your advertising in our own family heirloom.
Thanks.
Manbou, thanks for the detailed feedback. We'll definitely take these into consideration. BTW, we do give the option now to remove our branding. We launched that a few weeks ago based mainly on feedback we got from customers like yourself.
What is teh real difference
I want to know how your 400.00 album compares to a FinaoOne Album. I can buy a Finao album for less than 400. I mean no disrespect, but I cannot believe your 400.00 album beats the quality of a Finao.
I want to know how your 400.00 album compares to a FinaoOne Album. I can buy a Finao album for less than 400. I mean no disrespect, but I cannot believe your 400.00 album beats the quality of a Finao.
I'm not an aficionado on FinaoOne Albums so I would have a hard time comparing our products directly to theirs. However, I can provide you with some details about our albums. We have two different sized genuine leather premium albums with a base price of $349.
The 11x8.5 album cover is made from genuine Nubuck leather, a top-grain cattle rawhide leather which has been sanded or buffed to produce a velvet-like surface. Nubuck is far more durable than the less expensive suede. This album uses the layflat hinge binding and can contain up to 250 pages.
The 8x8 album cover is made from genuine leather and can include a debossed image and foil stamping. It is a flush mount album consisting of up to 80, heavy stock, matted pages.
Just received my first book. The fit and finish of the nuba is nice. The printed pages look good and the color seems pretty on. I have noticed a slight darkening overall compared to the same photos I have printed through EZprints (or was it Bay?). You can actually see the darkening in the MyCanvas interface when you have SmugMug up on a second monitor.
I would like to be able to alter the preset layouts for a page with the photos in situ. Also, i would like to be able to remove a photo from a frame so that it goes back to the thumbnails pane without the frame being deleted. Furthermore, I want to see thumbnails in their natural orientation. How difficult it is to fill a book not knowing the orientation or your source material!
Your alignment tools need to be improved with respect to aligning photos not to each other but relative to the corners of the pages. I often want to take 4 landscape photos and "inflate" them equally to be as large as they can be on the page without touching.
The fact you can share and let others see and buy your books is the main reason I went with MyCanvas and number two reason is the SmugMug partnership. Both of those are huge. Keep up the good work.
Just received my first book. The fit and finish of the nuba is nice. The printed pages look good and the color seems pretty on. I have noticed a slight darkening overall compared to the same photos I have printed through EZprints (or was it Bay?). You can actually see the darkening in the MyCanvas interface when you have SmugMug up on a second monitor.
I would like to be able to alter the preset layouts for a page with the photos in situ. Also, i would like to be able to remove a photo from a frame so that it goes back to the thumbnails pane without the frame being deleted. Furthermore, I want to see thumbnails in their natural orientation. How difficult it is to fill a book not knowing the orientation or your source material!
Your alignment tools need to be improved with respect to aligning photos not to each other but relative to the corners of the pages. I often want to take 4 landscape photos and "inflate" them equally to be as large as they can be on the page without touching.
The fact you can share and let others see and buy your books is the main reason I went with MyCanvas and number two reason is the SmugMug partnership. Both of those are huge. Keep up the good work.
Thanks for the feedback, Pindy.
We should be pulling thumbnails across the same way you have them set up on SmugMug. You may need to customize your gallery and set the thumbnails to "original" if they are set at square. That way you will be able to see their orientation. Unfortunately you may not be able to see the changes immediately on MyCanvas since SmugMug has temporarily shut down the connection authorization feature to work out some issues.
We definitely need to add the ability to align objects to the page and not just to each other. This and the ability to remove an image from a frame are both on our long list of improvements and new features.
I'm not clear on what you mean by the following request. "I would like to be able to alter the preset layouts for a page with the photos in situ." Do you mean that you'd like to be able to make your own layouts and add those custom layouts to the "Layouts" tab?
By the way, you should watch for our new "swap photos" feature that is expected to roll later this week.
I'm not clear on what you mean by the following request. "I would like to be able to alter the preset layouts for a page with the photos in situ." Do you mean that you'd like to be able to make your own layouts and add those custom layouts to the "Layouts" tab?
What I mean is I want to change from one layout preset to another and keep the chosen photos in relative positions. So if page 13 is a 4-up portrait layout, I want to be able to swap out the layout preset to, say, another 4-up and have the photos I've chosen for that page populate the frames of the layout I'm swapping in its place. Make sense?
What I mean is I want to change from one layout preset to another and keep the chosen photos in relative positions. So if page 13 is a 4-up portrait layout, I want to be able to swap out the layout preset to, say, another 4-up and have the photos I've chosen for that page populate the frames of the layout I'm swapping in its place. Make sense?
Excellent description...I'm perfectly clear on what you're saying now. This is a very reasonable request but may not be as easy to implement as it sounds. Right now we use some logic to place photos in layouts based on size and orientation so that is part of the reason photos don't always keep their relative position. I'm sure we can find ways to improve how we position the photos but in the meantime, because we don't know exactly how someone wants their photos positioned, we have added photo swapping.
The photo swapping feature allows you to easily swap one photo with another to quickly rearrange your photos in the desired relative position. I expect this feature to launch today or early next week.
Heavy stock paper
I was wondering if you offer the heavy stock paper in the larger albums. I looked through the site and noticed this type of paper mounting is only available for the 8x8.
I was wondering if you offer the heavy stock paper in the larger albums. I looked through the site and noticed this type of paper mounting is only available for the 8x8.
Yes, I'm sorry but we currently only offer the board book binding as an 8x8.
It's been the better part of a year since you guys posted about your tax/legal issues with orders from Canada, any luck getting that one resolved? Or am I going to have to work around that one?
It's been the better part of a year since you guys posted about your tax/legal issues with orders from Canada, any luck getting that one resolved? Or am I going to have to work around that one?
There is a new possibility on the horizon but it may take months to get implemented. This is a fairly complex solution and is dependent on several factors so it is possible that it won't end up being implemented. I wish I could go into more details but I can't.
We are currently exploring a pro offering and would like to get input from pros with clients. How can we best reach out to the pro on SmugMug to get this input? How many of you would like to create products for your clients vs. allowing your clients to create products from the photos you have taken for them?
Please let me know if you are willing answer some questions or take a survey to help us better understand what you would like in such an offering?
Thanks, Kelvin
It has been over a year since you mentioned the possibility of a pro offering. Any progress on this yet? I have had to buy several of my books and then turn around and ship them to clients, causing "double" shipping charges.
I really would love to see a pro offering--soon!! Pretty please?
If we could then add the books into our SmugMug pricing under merchandise, that would be perfect. I keep having people want to "order" my book, but there's no way for them to order it unless I don't make any profit.
I know I have the option to use Blurb for this, but I really love My Canvas!
I wanted to start a thread here to start getting your input to our newest Book and Collage maker MyCanvas. smugmug.mycanvas.com clap
Currently they are running pretty amazing special for all SmugMug customers, just go to your "buy" button on any SmugMug gallery. Click on "Create a book" or "Create a Collage" and you will see MyCanvas there. You have GOT to check out their Premium books!! :ivar:ivar
I am looking for feedback, thoughts, suggestions, complaints etc. I am going to get one or two of the MyCanvas people to join Dgrin and support their service just like Blurb does.
We love our partners!!
Thanks,
Markham
Had a few moments to search and explore and tried taking a look at MyCanvas. Got past the authorization, but no further. Then, I got a message that SmugMug couldn't authorize the site (but it already had). Then I was authorized again, but couldn't get further. With more time I will check out the tutorial. The last thing I need right now, though, is to get frustrated over something that looks intuitive but isn't. Good luck withit.
JPCanvas said in April 2009 that they were working on tax issues so they could ship to Canada soon and it is still not sorted out??? Smugmug does not seem to have any problem dealing with Canada. Come on its not that complicated!
Sorry to say that last year I had a calendar made by MyCanvas and they were horrible, just horrible. The color was completely off as was the image alignment. They reprinted three times and three times the calendar was a disaster. I received a refund from them and went back to using Kodak to create and print my calendars as I did this year too and they are beautiful. It's a shame our customers cannot create calendars and cards though our SmugMug websites. That would bring in a good bit of revenue.
Comments
Manbou, unfortunately we don't offer unbound pages at this time. However, we are working to offer proof books in the very near future.
Thanks for the feedback, blue-dolphin. We continue making changes and updates as quickly as we can and take into account the feedback we receive as we make those changes.
Just yesterday we rolled checkmarks for used photos and the ability to hide those used photos. When you mouse over a checkmark you can even see the pages in your project that the photo is used on.
We also rolled a color picker/eye dropper that allows you to select any color on the page to apply to text, text boxes and photo border colors. You will also be able to pick background colors the same way very soon.
Sometime in February we also plan to allow users to select a starting month for their calendars.
Montec and other professionals, I think you'll be happy to hear that we will soon be launching the ability for professionals to turn off the branding page on printed books and calendars. In addition you will also be able to turn off the branding page and any references to pricing when sharing an electronic version of the project with a client.
Unfortunately, Montec, the cover you ordered is our entry level product and is not intended for the professional photography market. Please try not to judge all our books and covers by this particular product. We have flush mount and hinge books with much higher quality and heavier weight paper. These books include a range of cover options such as genuine leather. The flush mount books use a very heavy paper/card stock for the pages.
Not to mention a bit pricey... I would hope service would be faster for the money. Guess I will look elsewhere for my poster sized photos...
Michael, sorry to hear you were disappointed with the pricing and processing times. For what it's worth, if you look closely at our prices and process times for our entry level books (nuba, bonded leather, etc...) I think you'll find that we are right in line with most other book publishers. In fact you'll see that our price per page in most cases is much lower than others. With regards to our premium books, yes you are correcct, they are more expensive and do take longer but they are individually hand crafted and you won't find them at other suppliers. With posters we use a high quality fujifilm at a high resolution. Many will use lower quality paper and resolution output to reduce the costs. We typically get great feedback on our final products. I hope this helps and that you'll consider using us but I certainly understand if you choose another option. There's lots to choose from out there.
The overall binding and page thickness was fine. But I have some suggestions for improvements:
(1) I would like to see an option to choose coated pages (like with a textured matte or semigloss finish), maybe with gold coloring on the edges of the pages themselves. I have seen wedding albums with this kind of coating and edging and they look and feel "professional". The uncoated pages in my MyCanvas album, while nice and thick, have kind of a plain look and feel to them that doesn't really seem right for a wedding album.
(2) I would also like the cover photo to be somehow "embedded" in the cover and not just be pasted onto the cover material as a separate piece of paper.
(3) Please, give us more options to customize the fonts on the cover!
(4) Let ordinary customers have the option to exclude your advertising page. Charge me more, I don't care, but my wife and I shouldn't have to carry your advertising in our own family heirloom.
Thanks.
Manbou, thanks for the detailed feedback. We'll definitely take these into consideration. BTW, we do give the option now to remove our branding. We launched that a few weeks ago based mainly on feedback we got from customers like yourself.
Thanks again,
John
I want to know how your 400.00 album compares to a FinaoOne Album. I can buy a Finao album for less than 400. I mean no disrespect, but I cannot believe your 400.00 album beats the quality of a Finao.
Owner/Photographer
Expose The Moment
Had a list of gear, now its to long, so lets say I have 2 bags and 15,000 worth of stuff.
I'm not an aficionado on FinaoOne Albums so I would have a hard time comparing our products directly to theirs. However, I can provide you with some details about our albums. We have two different sized genuine leather premium albums with a base price of $349.
- The 11x8.5 album cover is made from genuine Nubuck leather, a top-grain cattle rawhide leather which has been sanded or buffed to produce a velvet-like surface. Nubuck is far more durable than the less expensive suede. This album uses the layflat hinge binding and can contain up to 250 pages.
- The 8x8 album cover is made from genuine leather and can include a debossed image and foil stamping. It is a flush mount album consisting of up to 80, heavy stock, matted pages.
Both albums are individually hand crafted.I would like to be able to alter the preset layouts for a page with the photos in situ. Also, i would like to be able to remove a photo from a frame so that it goes back to the thumbnails pane without the frame being deleted. Furthermore, I want to see thumbnails in their natural orientation. How difficult it is to fill a book not knowing the orientation or your source material!
Your alignment tools need to be improved with respect to aligning photos not to each other but relative to the corners of the pages. I often want to take 4 landscape photos and "inflate" them equally to be as large as they can be on the page without touching.
The fact you can share and let others see and buy your books is the main reason I went with MyCanvas and number two reason is the SmugMug partnership. Both of those are huge. Keep up the good work.
Thanks for the feedback, Pindy.
We should be pulling thumbnails across the same way you have them set up on SmugMug. You may need to customize your gallery and set the thumbnails to "original" if they are set at square. That way you will be able to see their orientation. Unfortunately you may not be able to see the changes immediately on MyCanvas since SmugMug has temporarily shut down the connection authorization feature to work out some issues.
We definitely need to add the ability to align objects to the page and not just to each other. This and the ability to remove an image from a frame are both on our long list of improvements and new features.
I'm not clear on what you mean by the following request. "I would like to be able to alter the preset layouts for a page with the photos in situ." Do you mean that you'd like to be able to make your own layouts and add those custom layouts to the "Layouts" tab?
By the way, you should watch for our new "swap photos" feature that is expected to roll later this week.
Thanks again for the feedback,
Kelvin
What I mean is I want to change from one layout preset to another and keep the chosen photos in relative positions. So if page 13 is a 4-up portrait layout, I want to be able to swap out the layout preset to, say, another 4-up and have the photos I've chosen for that page populate the frames of the layout I'm swapping in its place. Make sense?
Excellent description...I'm perfectly clear on what you're saying now. This is a very reasonable request but may not be as easy to implement as it sounds. Right now we use some logic to place photos in layouts based on size and orientation so that is part of the reason photos don't always keep their relative position. I'm sure we can find ways to improve how we position the photos but in the meantime, because we don't know exactly how someone wants their photos positioned, we have added photo swapping.
The photo swapping feature allows you to easily swap one photo with another to quickly rearrange your photos in the desired relative position. I expect this feature to launch today or early next week.
I was wondering if you offer the heavy stock paper in the larger albums. I looked through the site and noticed this type of paper mounting is only available for the 8x8.
Yes, I'm sorry but we currently only offer the board book binding as an 8x8.
There is a new possibility on the horizon but it may take months to get implemented. This is a fairly complex solution and is dependent on several factors so it is possible that it won't end up being implemented. I wish I could go into more details but I can't.
Kelvin
It has been over a year since you mentioned the possibility of a pro offering. Any progress on this yet? I have had to buy several of my books and then turn around and ship them to clients, causing "double" shipping charges.
I really would love to see a pro offering--soon!! Pretty please?
If we could then add the books into our SmugMug pricing under merchandise, that would be perfect. I keep having people want to "order" my book, but there's no way for them to order it unless I don't make any profit.
I know I have the option to use Blurb for this, but I really love My Canvas!
Jean Chang Photography
www.jeanachang.blogspot.com
Had a few moments to search and explore and tried taking a look at MyCanvas. Got past the authorization, but no further. Then, I got a message that SmugMug couldn't authorize the site (but it already had). Then I was authorized again, but couldn't get further. With more time I will check out the tutorial. The last thing I need right now, though, is to get frustrated over something that looks intuitive but isn't. Good luck withit.
www.photobycate.com
http://photobycate.wordpress.com/