Ever since MyPublisher shut down last year, one of the most common questions we’ve received is “who are you going to use to make your family photo book now?” For months we didn’t have a good answer because we only create our annual family yearbooks in January, after the previous year has ended. Now that 2018 is here, we’ve added our 2017 album to the stack and are very pleased with the result.
We’re not experts on photo-printing services, but after relying on MyPublisher for years (our first annual album was from them in 2011) we’d grown used to their quality and layouts. Like many of you, we were disappointed when they closed last spring.
Hundreds of you offered recommendations on Instagram and Facebook. The most common names were Blurb, Mixbook, Artifact Uprising, and Shutterfly (the service MyPublisher was absorbed into). After weighing the suggestions and doing a little research, Blurb came up most often, with Mixbook close behind. Shutterfly was mentioned frequently but seemed polarizing—many people said they tried it and didn’t like it.
Based on your feedback and some exploration, we decided to try Blurb. I can’t directly compare it to every other option since our main point of comparison is our old MyPublisher albums, but for anyone familiar with MyPublisher’s quality and photo layouts, Blurb is a very close match and excels in some areas. This isn’t a sponsored post—we paid for our book like everyone else and waited on the porch for delivery.
Size
The spine of Blurb’s Standard Landscape Photo Book is only half an inch shorter than the MyPublisher standard we used to order, so it sits nicely with our existing collection. It’s about an inch and a half less wide, but that difference isn’t noticeable when the books are stored flat or upright, so our stack still looks uniform. It may sound trivial, but part of the fun in making these books is watching the stack grow, so we were happy to find a product that fits with our tradition.
Price
Our Blurb book ended up costing around $43, roughly $5 less than what we typically paid with MyPublisher, though this year’s book used 15 fewer pages, so it’s not an exact apples-to-apples comparison. With MyPublisher we often paid for lots of extra pages—one year the price could have approached $130—so we’d wait for their “Free Extra Pages” promotion to save about $80. Blurb’s discount codes seemed less generous, but their base pricing was noticeably cheaper. Without discounts, Blurb would have cost substantially less than MyPublisher would have for a comparable book.
Layout & Software
Like MyPublisher, Blurb offers free downloadable software for offline layout called BookWright. It’s leaner and faster—importing photos and working in the app felt quicker than our past experience with MyPublisher. BookWright has fewer preset layouts, but you can save custom templates for reuse. It wasn’t as intuitive for swapping photos, and I didn’t notice until after ordering that there’s a “trim area” guide to prevent important parts of images from being cut off. A few pages ended up more tightly cropped than I wanted, but now that I know about the trim guides, I’ll avoid that in future books.
Quality
To my eye, there’s no noticeable difference between Blurb’s finished product and the MyPublisher books we own. The spine on our Blurb book felt a little crisper, perhaps because this book is shorter. The photo-wrapped cover and interior pages met our expectations for color and clarity, despite BookWright warning that several iPhone photos were low resolution. A professional might spot finer details under magnification, but to my somewhat picky eye—attuned to undertones and lighting—the photos look great. There wasn’t a single image I’d complain about, and the book contains over 400 photos.
We’re grateful to be able to continue our Family Yearbook tradition. The kids often ask to pull the books down and look through them, and it’s always a special moment when the new book arrives and we get to “read” it together for the first time.
Thanks to everyone who recommended Blurb! Happy yearbooking!
P.S. If you’re wondering why we prefer photo books over traditional photo albums, we’ve written about how much space and money they can save.
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