Make Annual Family Photo Books, from the workbench

Ever since MyPublisher shut down last year, one of the most frequent questions we have been getting is “who are you going to use to make your family photo book now??” For months and months, we had no good answer because we only print these annual “family yearbooks” in January, once the previous year has wrapped up (you can see examples of them here). But now that 2018 is here, we have officially brought in our 2017 album to the stack and we are QUITE glad with the result.

We are no experts on photo printing services by any means, but after becoming dedicated users of MyPublisher for YEARS (we purchased our first annual album from them back in 2011) we had become fairly accustomed to their service and (more importantly) had built a pleasant uniform stack as each year passed. And judging by the response from you folks, we were not the only ones who were upset to see them close up shop last spring.

But we got TONS of suggestions from you folks (hundreds of recommendations on Instagram and Facebook when we asked what you used and liked) and many of the more common suggestions included Blurb, Mixbook, Artifact Uprising, and Shutterfly (the service MyPublisher was absorbed into). After weighing all of them, we noticed that Blurb seemed to be recommended the most frequently (closely followed by Mixbook) and Shutterfly was frequently mentioned but seemed to be polarizing (many people chimed in to say they tried it and did not like it).

So simply based on all of your feedback, and a bit of poking around on a few websites, we opted to try Blurb. I cannot speak to how it stacks up to the other suggestions (since all we have to compare it to are our MyPublisher albums), but I can say for anyone else who is familiar with MyPublisher and their quality and varied photo-layouts, it is a fairly close match. In fact it is even better in some areas. And this is not a sponsored post or anything like that (they do not know us from Adam). We paid for our book and waited impatiently on the front porch simply like everyone else.

Size

For starters, the spine of their Standard Landscape Photo Book measures simply 1/2″ shorter than the old standard size from MyPublisher we used to order, meaning it stacks truly naturally on top of our existing collection (it is the one with the yellow spine below). It is about an inch and a half less wide too, but you cannot typically tell that when they are stored flat like this (or leaned vertically now that I think about it) since that is in the back anyway. I know this seems like a weird thing to obsess over, but part of the lively of making these books has been watching the stack grow. So we are glad to have found something that allows us to keep building on the same pile.

Price

The final price of my Blurb book ended up being around $43, which is about $5 less than what I typically spent for our MyPublisher albums, but I did use 15 fewer pages this year so it is admittedly not a ideal apples-to-apples comparison. A lot of our cost for MyPublisher was paying for extra pages. We consistently used their max of 99 pages, which one year could’ve cost me nearly $130, so I consistently waited to order our album until their “Free Extra Pages” promotion came around, saving me about $80. Blurb’s discount codes did not seem to be quite as generous (I got one by email that saved me 30%) but their base pricing was much cheaper. Without discounts, I would have spent LESS THAN HALF of what MyPublisher would’ve charged (around $60 versus $130).

Layout & Software

Like MyPublisher, Blurb allows you to download free software to lay out your book offline. Theirs is called BookWright and it had fewer bells and whistles, but also performed much faster (it used to take me FOREVER to upload all of my pictures into the MyPublisher software). It was fairly slim on preset photo layouts, but you can save your own custom templates to easily solve that. It also was not quite as straightforward to swap photos around and I did not discover until AFTER I ordered our book that you can turn on the “trim area” guides (the purple border below pops up to assist you prevent any text or faces from getting trimmed off). So some of my pages ended up being a little more closely cropped than I would’ve liked, but now that I know how to activate that feature it will not happen again.

Quality

Again, I am no printing aficionado, but I found no discernable difference between Blurb and MyPublisher’s final product. In fact, I like how Blurb’s spine was a little sharper than MyPublisher’s – although perhaps that is the difference of it being 15 pages shorter.

The photo-wrapped cover and the insides all met my standards for color and crispness, despite BookWright warning me that many of the iPhone photos included were too low resolution. A true photographer or graphic designer studying it with a magnifying lens might be more particular about how their images were reproduced, but to my (somewhat picky) naked eye, which you know has a lot of opinions about undertones and lighting, they certainly look strong. No complaints about a single photo – and the book contains over 400!

I am likely forgetting something, but I feel like I have blabbed on sufficient about this random topic. Again, I am still surprised by how many people cared, so I hoped to give you folks a full report. I think the most essential thing is that we are truly grateful that we can carry on our “Family Yearbook” tradition since they’ve each become so essential to us. The kids are frequently asking to pull them down and look through them, and it is consistently an exciting day when the new book arrives and we can “read” it together for the first time.