I looked at two different vendors: Shutterfly and Blurb. Most people are probably familiar with Shutterfly. They are one of the top online photo services sites offering prints, calendars, cups, cards, and photo books. More recently, they have expanded into the social networking area where they have a community of users who share their photo books online. Blurb is a lesser known online photo services site. They specialize in photo books. Not only can you create and publish you own photo book with Blurb, but you can also offer your book for sale in the Blurb bookstore.
In order to evaluate which vendor would best meet my needs, I created two separate books using the software and tools provided by Shutterfly and Blurb. I evaluated the two based on the following criteria:
1) How easy was it to put together?
2) Did the book have the right look and feel?
3) How much did it cost?
Shutterfly
I started out looking at Shutterfly's gallery of photo books. They currently have hundreds of customer books you can browse through to get inspiration and ideas from. One book in their "Travel" section features a family's trip to Cancun that is similar to what I would like to create. Shutterfly allows you to copy the design, style and layout of any book in their gallery. This gives me a starting point for the color scheme for my own book.
Shutterfly provides you with an online editing tool for creating your photo book. This means that all your photos have to be uploaded to their server before you can start. Depending on your connection speed and the size and number of photos you have, this can be a painfully slow process. I recommend doing this when you will not need access to your computer and/or network (e.g., overnight).
Once you got your pictures uploaded into an album, I found the Shutterfly editing tool to be very easy to use. To create the pages to the album, I simply choose a layout and a background for each page.
The layouts are organized by number of photos. If I want to create a photo page with 3 photos, I simply click on the "3" button and all the available layouts for 3 photos appear. Some of their layouts are very whimsical; the photos may be rotated at different angles or overlap each other. They have a large selection of layouts; I had the choice of "just photos", "just text", or a mixture of both.
Shutterfly also has an extensive selection of backgrounds to choose from. They vary in texture, patterns and colors. They are even organized thematically so if you choose a "Baby" theme, you will get a selection of pastel colored baby backgrounds. However, despite the large choice of backgrounds, I sometimes found myself looking for a specific shade of color that they didn't have.
Once you have selected a layout and background for your page, it's very simple to add your photos. Just drag and drop from your photo album. Once you've used a picture, a check mark appears next to it. This comes in handy if you have hundreds of photos in your album and you can't remember if you've already put a specific photo in your album.
The one frustrating thing I found about Shutterfly's editing tool is that it doesn't let you undo changes. I constantly make mistakes or want to revert back to a former state. Yet, I can't undo changes I have made. Also, any modification I make seems to be automatically saved. Very annoying!
Using the Shutterfly service, I was able to create a very colorful, vibrant and fun photo book which documented our family's trip to Cancun. It took about 6 hours (not including upload time) and the book is 37 pages. The cost of the 12x12 book (with a basic photo cover) is $80.49.
Blurb
Blurb is meant for the more serious book publisher. I used it last year to publish a book on my sister-in-law's adoption trip to Kazakhstan. The quality of that book is wonderful. It looks just like a professionally published coffee table book that you would buy from a bookstore complete with paper dust jacket. Hence, I was curious to see if it would be appropriate for our family Cancun trip.
To use Blurb, you need to download the editing software, called "BookSmart" onto your computer. This means that all the editing is done on your computer rather than on their server. This can present a problem if you have an older machine. I have a MacBook Pro with Intel processor and the system was often sluggish in response. Also, I found the software would often lock up or quit unexpectedly.
Like Shutterfly, it's pretty easy to create a photo book page in BookSmart. You are provided with page layout templates and backgrounds and then you drag and drop photos onto each page. The layout templates for photos in BookSmart are more traditional and not as whimsical. They are laid out in a very linear and blocklike fashion which gives a more sterile or formal feel to the pages. I also found that there are not as many background designs to choose from. The ones they provide are in 2 tone colors - foreground and background. For example, in one of my Shutterfly pages, I created a page which had 5 different stripes of colors - 2 shades of green, 2 shades of blue and white). In BookSmart, I was only able to create a blue background with a green stripe. However, one nice extra feature BookSmart does have is the ability to customize the foreground and background colors by selecting any color from the color well. So, although the number of colors on the BookSmart page is limited, at least I got to choose the colors.
BookSmart also has the concept of ornaments in their page layout. Ornaments are embellishments that you can use to decorate the photo pages. I found the ornaments to be a little too fancy for the type of book I was putting together but for more formal books, they may be a nice touch.
A couple of other nice features to BookSmart... You can create a table of contents page and an index page which gives you a way to organize larger books. Again, this gives the book a more formal or coffee table feel to it rather just being a photo album. Another nice feature is the ability to import text and pictures (called "slurping") from an online blog into a book.
It took me about 3 hours to create a similar 37 page book in BookSmart. The quicker turnaround was mainly because I knew the basic layout of the book I was creating. When creating a photo book, most of my time is spent laying out the story and sequence of pictures and choosing the right color scheme for the book. The cost for a 13 x 11 hardcover book (with dust jacket) is $54.95.
Summary/Conclusion:
I was surprised at how quick it was to put together books in both Shutterfly and Blurb. It was slightly easier working with the Shutterfly tools - the interface was a little more intuitive and the software was more reliable. However, the BookSmart software was not difficult to learn and was decent for the job.
In the end, I ended up choosing the Shutterfly photo book for purchase. Although it was more expensive, I thought the end result was more fun and colorful -- the look I was trying to achieve!
