When MyPublisher closed last year, many readers asked us the same question: who will we use to print our annual family photo book now? We waited until the start of the new year to finish our 2017 album, and after testing a few options we were very pleased with the result.
We aren’t experts in photo printing, but we had relied on MyPublisher for years and loved the consistent look of our yearly “family yearbooks.” After their closure we received hundreds of recommendations from readers, and a few names came up again and again. Based on that feedback and some hands-on testing, we decided to try Blurb for our latest album. This is an honest, unpaid review: we ordered the book ourselves and waited on the front porch like everyone else.
Size
One of the practical concerns for us was maintaining a uniform stack of albums. The spine of Blurb’s Standard Landscape Photo Book is slightly shorter than the MyPublisher size we used to order, so it sits neatly with our existing collection. The book is a bit less wide, but when stored flat or upright the difference is barely noticeable. If you value a tidy, consistent shelf of yearbooks, Blurb’s dimensions worked well for us.
Price
Our finished Blurb book cost about $43. That ran roughly $5 less than what we typically paid at MyPublisher, although this year’s album used 15 fewer pages, so it’s not a perfect one-to-one comparison. MyPublisher’s pricing often rose sharply with extra pages, so we frequently waited for promotions to keep costs down. Blurb’s base pricing is competitive, and while their discount codes felt less generous than some previous promotions we’d used, the lower base price made the book an affordable option overall.
Layout & Software
Blurb offers a free offline layout tool called BookWright. Compared with the MyPublisher software we used in the past, BookWright has fewer bells and whistles but runs much faster and felt more stable. It includes fewer preset photo layouts, though you can create and save custom templates for repeated use. Some tasks, like swapping photos between frames, weren’t quite as intuitive at first. I also didn’t discover the trim-area guides until after the book was ordered; once enabled, those purple guide lines help prevent faces or important text from being cut off during printing. A few pages were tighter than I would have liked because I missed that setting, but knowing how to turn on the guides fixes that going forward.
Quality
To my eye, the printed result was on par with our MyPublisher books. The photo-wrapped cover and interior pages displayed good color and clarity, and the spine felt slightly crisper, possibly because our book was a bit thinner. BookWright warned that several iPhone photos were low resolution, but in the finished product those images looked fine. A professional photographer or designer might scrutinize every detail under magnification, but for everyday family albums the colors and sharpness were excellent. We packed the book with more than 400 photos and didn’t find any photos that disappointed.
Overall, Blurb delivered a high-quality, well-priced option that matched our needs for a consistent, attractive family yearbook. It kept our tradition alive and made it easy to continue the annual habit of compiling the year’s memories into a single, shareable volume.
The kids love pulling the books down and looking through them, and the arrival of a new yearbook is still an exciting family moment. If you’ve been searching for a reliable photo-book printer after MyPublisher’s closure, Blurb is a solid choice based on our experience: it balances price, quality, and layout flexibility while keeping the look of our collection consistent.
Thanks to everyone who suggested Blurb. Happy yearbooking!
P.S. For readers curious why we prefer printed yearbooks over traditional photo albums, we’ve written about how they can save space and money while making pictures easier to enjoy as a family.
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