Your first step is to select a photo book publisher. There are lots of choices and I have reviewed and compared some of the most popular in the Photo Book Publishers section of this site. For your first book, you might even want to create the book using several publishers before deciding which one to buy from. All publishers reviewed on this site allow you to design your book for free. You only pay when you purchase the final product.
When you are choosing a publisher, the first thing that you should look at is the book sizes and covers that they offer to make sure they can help you to make the photo book that you have in mind. All publishers offer the standard 8.5 x 11 inch book and usually a smaller size (6×8 or 5×7). Picaboo offers a larger book (11×14) if you are creating one of their luxury book options. Shutterfly offers 12×12 and 8×8 square books with custom photo covers.
If you are creating a very special book, for a wedding for example or other very special occasion, Picaboo is the best choice. They offer a range of high end books that are truely beautiful. These books use 110lb matte archival quality paper (higher quality than the usual 100lb glossy used in other photo books) and have a ‘lay flat’ binding that allows the pages if book to lie perfectly flat when opened. Picaboo is also great for everyday photo books, which are comparable in price to Shutterfly for 20 page books.
Shutterfly are great value and offer a wide range of design options and easy to use online software. They also have a photo sharing service and a wide range of other photo products, including prints and gifts. So you can store your photos at Shutterfly to share them with family and friends and then easily create prints, photo books and gifts from them.
OurHubbub is a Jostens company, best known for yearbooks and class rings, so they are a good choice for scholl and kids books. They have a huge range of school sports teams and activities related themes. Our Hubbub is also great for anyone who wants flexible page layouts. The OurHubbub software allows you to change the positioning of photos on the page and resize the frames instead of restricting you to pre-defined layouts. You can also determine how each photo is cropped.
