Six Reasons for Creating Your Next Photo Album Online

By Leanne Tremblay

First let me say right off the bat that I've never been an album person. I'm just not organized enough to label and sort photos. Scrapbooking is not my thing either.

Our family photo albums consist of three-ring binders with plastic sleeves for holding 4x6 photos. And even that's a stretch.

We've got literally shoeboxes FULL of unmounted, unalbummed prints. Sound familiar?

However, since I've discovered how to create a photo album online, it's a brand new world! I am amazed at what I produce in mini bursts of time, which is all I have to spare these days.

If you're new to the concept, photo books are digitally created books of your own photos, with captions, journaling, and your choice of covers, page backgrounds and layouts. You create your photo album online, and then it's printed and bound professionally like a real hardcover or soft cover book you'd find in the bookstore. Leading the pack in photo book design and production are online merchants Shutterfly, Kodak Gallery, Snapfish, and Photoworks.com.

If you're tempted to learn more, here's a few of the great advantages as I see them:

Drag and Drop Layouts

This is perhaps the biggest advantage for me. Each photo book comes with dozens of pre-designed layout choices. Just drag and drop your photos onto these layouts to see your photo book come to life.

Shown: Shutterfly drag and drop

There's very little pre-planning required so the result is that you can put together the story of your vacation, wedding, baby shower, or parent's anniversary FAST.

It's really that easy. For some of you, it limits your freedom to arrange and fiddle, but on the whole, the time-saving factor more than makes up for that.

Full Bleed Layouts

Full bleed is something you'll never get with traditional scrapbooking.  It's when the picture is printed right to the edge of the paper.

In addition to the printing and binding, full bleed layouts are what set your photo book apart and turns it into a coffee table book.

All Those Photos, and No Mess

With often hundreds of photos to choose from when putting together an album, keeping them all organized and easy to find is a hassle. Now add to that the cutting, pasting and matting that goes with traditional scrapbooking and you've got a real mess on your hands.

When you build a photo book, all your photos are uploaded to your own personal and secure gallery. Just scroll through and pick the ones you want to use. Way less mess!

Fast Cropping and Photo Fixing

Unlike regular scrapbooking, you can crop the same photo online to your heart's content until you find the right size and composition. If you want to zoom in on a small portion of a photograph, like a baby's hand for example, you can do it with online editing tools and drop it into your layout, preserving a copy of the original for another page. Not so easy when you're scrapping. If you make a mistake cropping a photo, too bad unless you printed duplicates. Same goes for photo sleeves, which generally come with only one or two standard sizes per sheet, like 4x6 or 3x5.

Fixing red eye online is also a snap, (and you need it to be)! I don't  know how many times an otherwise perfectly great photo is a big disappointment because someone's got the those beady red demon eyes! To be fair, if you take digital pictures and scrapbook, you can fix all these photographic problems before having your photos printed.

Sharing your Photo Book

What if you want to share your album with the family? While that's awkward to do when the book is a one-off, by saving your photo book online, you can also make it available to for others to view on the web. If family and friends want their own printed copy, they can easily order one.

Not that Expensive!

Anyone who has ever scrapped knows that by the time you're finished buying the album itself, the paper, adhesive, embellishments, bits and bobs, you're into it for quite a sum.

Digital photo books cost around $30 for a 20-page album. That's $30 printed and bound professionally. Shipping is extra of course, and that seems to be about $5 to $7. In some cases you can pick up your photo book at a well known retailer like Target, Walgreens, or CVS. You save a little on the overall cost that way.

Disadvantages

In the spirit of fairness, lets look at a few of the disadvantages.

As mentioned before, you are limited by the pre-designed layouts and backgrounds provided by the online print site. However, if you have a really crazy layout in mind, Shutterfly gives you the option to upload your own digital pages created in Photoshop or other graphics program. They assemble the pages and print the book for you. (Okay, that was supposed to be a disadvantage.)

The hands-on act of scrapbooking or assembling a family photo album is for some people a highly creative, personal, and social process. Those who do, gain much satisfaction and pride from their finished project. It's more than just plopping photos on the page. You may not get the same buzz from creating an online photo book. (Although, I wager you'd have fun!)

Photo books obviously can't be added to once printed. If your family album is a work in progress, and you prefer adding pages as you go, then it might not be for you (however, see the first disadvantage point above for a way around this.)

Overall, I think online photo books are worth a try. Most photo printing sites offer you a set of free prints just for signing up, and regular discounts on photo books throughout the year. We opted for an annual plan from Shutterfly which includes a free 8x10 photo book (a $29.95 value).

Get 25 free prints just for trying Shutterfly 

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