Photo Album Service

Aaron Bernard

Anyone know where I can get a real (not web based) photo album made up? What I mean is I want to send .jpg's in a get a full album out. So Im looking for some kind of a service that will do this kind of thing.

thanks!

gluwater

iPhoto books
I haven't tried this but it seems relatively cheap and looks decent, at least on-line.

http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/books/

They start at 20 Double Sided pages, and range from $9.99-$29.99 and $.99 an additional page.

Has anyone here tried donig this?

Nick

mercphoto

gluwater wrote:

Has anyone here tried donig this?

Yes. A few years ago I didn't like the quality. But recently it has improved a lot. I wish they offered a leather cover. The print quality is really quite high. And with the iPhoto software you can arrange photos in a wide variety of ways, including text captioning if you wish.

DavidTO

I've been happy with iPhoto books.

I did find this entry on macosxhints.com, which may be helpful:

macosxhints.com wrote:

Having had a small book made through iPhoto earlier in the year and being really happy with the results, I decided to order one of the large books made from pictures of a recent vacation. When I received the book, the prints were mediocre, and that's being kind.

I have now learned the reason. When you upload a medium or large book to Apple, iPhoto creates a PDF file with images that are only 150dpi. The small books are at 300dpi, which is much more suitable for printing. Consider the fact that at 130dpi, iPhoto warns you that the image will not look good printed, and you can see the problem.

The solution? Edit ~/Library -> Preferences -> com.apple.iPhoto.plist and change both BookTargetImageDPI and BookTargetMediumImageDPI to 300.000000. This will dramatically increase the size of the file sent to Apple, but should make the results look a lot better.

[robg adds: I haven't tested this one, but it's evident in the plist file that the DPI setting for the medium and large books is 150DPI, versus 300DPI for the small books. I'm not sure why Apple would have it set this way, nor if changing it will really improve the printd quality -- isn't it also dependent on the resolution of the source images? Anyone with a better understanding of DPI and printing, please leave a comment!

If you want to edit the plist file and you're in 10.4, you'll either have to use Apple's Property List Editor (part of the Developer Tools) or convert the binary plist to XML first via the Terminal (plutil -convert xml1 filename), and remember to convert it back to binary (binary1) when you're done -- and remember to quit iPhoto prior to editing the plist file! I think I'll wait on the edit until reading some of the comments...]

gluwater

Thanks for the info mercphoto. They seem relatively cheap. I work in the digital printing field, not photos but a Xerox iGen color digital press and stuff we do is way more expensive than that.

DavidTO

Here is a clearer explanation of the hack:

http://www.macilife.com/2005/04/hacking-iphotos-preferences-to-get.html

fishlips

shutterfly
shutterfly does photobooks. i can't say how good or bad they are though. we did use them for christmas cards last year and were pleasantly surprised at how well they turned out.


http://www.shutterfly.com/photobooks/index.jsp

phil

Mitchell

Just had a write up on these in the Wall Street Journal. The favorite was My Publisher at http://www.mypublisher.com/default.php . The Mac product came in a close second. They really liked the leather cover options and to the edge printing of My Publisher.

Aaron Bernard

Thanks for all the great info guys!