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After a new round of testing, we continue to recommend Mixbook's beautifully produced books to capture memories. We also added Walmart Photo as the best budget-friendly option.
We live in a digital world full of images and screens. By taking a step back and creating a tangible photo album, you will be able to reconnect your images and those moments. Sharing memories with family and friends will be much easier. After more than 80 hours of research and testing (including making 17 books and consulting the main printer results), we recommend Mixbook as the best online photo album service.
Mixbook provides the best photo album making experience, modern design options, and colorful and accurate photo quality. The service also provides excellent customer service and impressively powerful applications.
Mixbook makes creating photo albums fun by collecting images from your computer, social media profiles, online photo storage accounts and even your smartphone. In our tests, it provided the best book making experience and some of the best theme layouts available. Our finished album looks vibrant, accurate in color, and feels great.
We spent more than 40 hours researching and comparing, and we found that the National Photo Lab is the best online photo printing service.
After six quarters of testing, Simply to Impress is still our first choice for choosing the best photo card printing service.
Walmart Photo offers high-quality photo albums at a discounted price. This may be particularly useful if you want to print multiple photo albums as gifts or for items that do not require the quality of souvenirs.
If you want to make a basic photo album, or want to reduce the cost because you have to make multiple copies, Walmart Photo is only half the cost of our preferred product, which is great value for money. This website provides some of the best photo editing tools to easily design and customize photo albums. But our photos look dull and dull, the cover is not as good as our first choice, and the page is thinner. So please note that cutting costs here is also equivalent to compromising quality.
Mixbook provides the best photo album making experience, modern design options, and colorful and accurate photo quality. The service also provides excellent customer service and impressively powerful applications.
Walmart Photo offers high-quality photo albums at a discounted price. This may be particularly useful if you want to print multiple photo albums as gifts or for items that do not require the quality of souvenirs.
In order to find out which features are important in the photo album service, since the first iteration of this review, we have researched more than 30 companies and created 17 photo albums. We compiled mixed images from high-resolution DSLR cameras and iPhones, and selected specific examples for color and resolution testing to directly compare the image quality of different albums. For the various editions of this guide, we consulted several experts, including Taylor McAtee, a printing expert and owner of Stretch and Staple, a printing shop in Seattle. We also showed our finished book to friends who like to make albums with family photos.
If you want to create a photo album for your digital photos, then the photo album service is definitely your best choice. Today's digital photo albums look more fashionable and elegant than old scrapbooks. They are also easier to replace if the original is damaged. Digital photo albums can be customized for any purpose, such as baby books, family travel photo albums, or even school yearbooks. They also made great gifts for grandparents and family members. If you are a photographer, photo albums are a great way to plan your work and can be copied for distribution.
If you want to make a more exquisite book to record special events such as weddings, please consider upgrading to a paperback book, which has a unique binding type that allows the two pages to be unfolded completely flat without a crease in the middle. You may also Consider choosing a more luxurious cover, such as leather or shredded silk, to suit the occasion.
If you have a set of old photo albums or a box of family photos, you can consider scanning these photos and upgrading to a digital photo album.
We researched more than 30 online photo album services, looking for a service that allows you to create customizable books with titles and multiple photos on one page. We canceled the service of drawing images directly from your Instagram or Facebook and automatically arranging them into a book (such as a chat book) that you cannot edit. Although we tested a service that can provide Photoshop-like full control over the layout of your book, we rejected any service that seemed too technical or complicated for people with no design experience.
Many photo printing services offer frequent and substantial discounts and promotions throughout the year, which makes accurate price comparisons difficult. Noting the existence of holiday sales, we cannot say with certainty whether one service will be cheaper than another at any given time. When choosing these books, we value image quality and user-friendly software more than variable pricing. In other words, we prioritize the service of providing basic, 20-page, approximately 8 x 11-inch books at a price of less than $50.
For users who need a photo album service that can create exquisite holiday scrapbooks, baby books, or wedding photo albums, we have determined that the following key features are important:
In order for us to update this review in 2021, I used the same set of vacation photos and four different services to create a 20-page photo album. These photos include DSLR photos taken by professional photographers and iPhone snapshots taken during my trip to Italy and France in the fall of 2019. I specifically selected images that may be difficult to print to understand how each service performs when using HDR (High Dynamic Range)) images, complex colors, black and white photos, and even dimly lit iPhone snapshots.
We use the most basic white template of the service to arrange each book in the same order. We also use the default font of each service as the title, sticking to the font and size assigned to the theme of our choice. All companies allow you to change the font, but this may be troublesome, and we decided that the specified font should be good enough. We take advantage of special features (if available), such as two-page layout or panoramic spreading. We also used the default cover and paper options for each book (this is the cheapest or second cheapest).
In the 2020 test, we took the completed book to Taylor McAtee, the printing expert and owner of Stretch and Staple, a Seattle printing shop, to compare and contrast print and page quality. McAtee printed several pictures we used in the test album on fine art paper as a control. When showing him the book, we concealed any identifying marks so that he could express a fair opinion.
We also showed photo albums to friends who like to make family photo albums. They provided useful real-world observations, such as which paper surface treatment is best for 5-year-old children’s dirty hands.
Mixbook provides the best photo album making experience, modern design options, and colorful and accurate photo quality. The service also provides excellent customer service and impressively powerful applications.
Mixbook's simple and intuitive design software, bright and accurate colors and modern layout make it our first choice for providing the best photo album service for most people. Mixbook is the only service we have tested for uploading photos from your phone, computer, social networks (such as Facebook and Instagram), and photo storage accounts (including Google and SmugMug).
If the vast majority of your iPhone photos end up trapped in your phone (like ours), we think you will also find that being able to add phone images directly to Mixbook can make the design process more efficient. Using the QR code on the computer screen, Mixbook will guide you to select and load pictures from your phone. After refreshing the screen, voila: your iPhone snapshot can now be added to your current project. If you don't mind working on a smaller screen, Mixbook also provides a powerful mobile application that is very similar to its desktop editor.
Mixbook's guide box is the most useful resource of all the services we have tested. You can close these pop-up windows as needed to provide hints when you start making books. Keyboard shortcuts help speed up the design. Mixbook's photo editing tools include the same basic options we see in most other services: brightness, saturation, contrast, and opacity. You can easily crop and zoom in and out of photos, although the free rotation tool is tricky (you have to click and hold the arrow in the circle to fix your horizon). Six filters can make your printed photos have an Instagram feel; you can also use shadows and borders, and even make the image into a heart shape. Text is easy to insert, and Mixbook provides a large selection of fonts and controls.
When extracting from the library of available images in Mixbook, you just need to hover your mouse over the photo to make it bigger, which we like very much. It can be difficult to select the next image based on the tiny thumbnail. But when I use other services, sometimes I have to add the actual photo to determine if it is the photo I intend to include in the first place.
Mixbook does not have as many layout options as its competitors, but each well-designed template can be left as it is or modified. Among the many other design decisions, fewer but better quality choices feel relieved. Mixbook offers 169 "everyday" album templates, from simple Minimal White designs (our choice) to birthdays, weddings and seasonal themes. In addition, the theme layout shows examples of actual photos, which is a really useful feature when envisioning the content you will create. To upgrade your project with better paper, more pages, and better cover material, look out for special offers, which are usually displayed on the banners on the Mixbook homepage and daily deals page.
As in the previous test, our 20-page, 11 x 8½-inch Mixbook is the most vivid of all the books we have created, and the colors best match our original photos. Mixbook seems to have color-corrected a tricky picture inside the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, picking up a lot of detail-even in the shadows-and capturing the bright colors of stained glass. This impressed our printing expert Taylor McAtee, who explained that the vibrant purple and neon pink of the image are difficult to print accurately. We contacted Mixbook and asked about its color correction practices. CEO and co-founder Andrew Laffoon confirmed that Mixbook automatically applies "very few" automatic corrections, and there is no way to turn it off. McAtee endorses this method and tells us that if the photo book service provides color correction, you should trust that professionals will adjust your images as needed.
The price of the Mixbook album is similar to the prices of other similar albums in this category. But it is always worthwhile to seek discounts, as the service usually offers valid 50% discount coupons. If you don't see a book available at checkout, you can make this book at any time and then wait to buy it until you can get a discount. This is especially convenient if you choose to upgrade, such as tiling pages, which can almost double the price of the album.
Unlike Snapfish, it treats our order as an invitation to send promotional emails every day. Once we create an account, Mixbook does not automatically flood our inbox with promotions. In fact, I have to enter the account settings to register for Mixbook’s email offer (you can easily unsubscribe). At the time of launch, Mixbook's website is promoting all purchase coupon codes with a discount of 40% to 50%, so you can watch the website for transactions instead of subscribing to bulk emails. No matter which photo album service you use, we recommend that you wait for a large number of coupons before placing an order-you can cancel your subscription at any time.
Unfortunately, the first album we ordered from Mixbook in 2021 had a corner when it arrived, although the plastic-wrapped book was packed in a cardboard box and it didn't seem to be damaged. We were able to chat with a customer service representative immediately, they asked for the damaged image, and then agreed to send us a new copy for free. The new copy arrived in just a few days and was intact. This time, it uses the minimalist wrap-around cardboard packaging used by Snapfish and Picaboo (which may prevent the album from sliding in the box). We suspect this incident is just an unfortunate mistake, because we did not encounter any problems when ordering from Mixbook in previous years. We are satisfied with how Mixbook remedies this situation. Sometimes, the best test of good customer service is to observe how the problem is handled.
The most basic album option for Mixbook is the second thickest page of the four books we created in 2021, similar to the pages of a coffee table book. These pages do feel durable enough to withstand the dirty paws of a child, and they have enough luster, we also think they can tolerate a little mess and be wiped clean.
Walmart Photo offers high-quality photo albums at a discounted price. This may be particularly useful if you want to print multiple photo albums as gifts or for items that do not require the quality of souvenirs.
Considering its easy-to-use software and the overall quality of the finished product, Wal-Mart photos have a high value in the album. Importing images from a computer or online photo storage and sharing platforms (such as Dropbox, Instagram, and Flickr) is as easy as our first choice. (Although Mixbook provides direct upload from your smartphone, Walmart does not.)
Photo editing tools are very useful, including the tilt function, which allows me to repair imperfect horizons-the photographer's darling. Unfortunately, both the photo experts we interviewed in 2020 and the non-experts we interviewed found that all the photos, including the cover image, looked dull and boring in the finished product. These pages are thinner than our preferred pages, making them easier to tear and bend. The cover is also thinner, and we noticed a slight glue defect on the inside of the back cover. However, leaving all these warnings aside, Wal-Mart’s album prices are the best value for money (their prices are half the prices of all other albums we’ve tested), so if you make a lot of books as holiday gifts and want To keep your budget low, or you are making albums that are more interesting than archiving purposes, Walmart Photo may be a good choice.
Our printing expert Taylor McAtee said that when you design a photo album, no matter which photo album service you choose, you should trust an expert. "Just choose the photos you like," McAtee said, explaining that because your home computer may not have a color-calibrated display, the edits you make on the screen may be very different when printed. He also offers two additional tips for choosing photos for printed books: Avoid faded, deliberately very bright (aka high-profile) images that usually don’t look as good when printed as on a glowing digital screen. And don't apply Instagram filters or use other editing applications that may compress iPhone files, because doing so will result in lower resolution photos when printing.
If you prefer a lot of photo editing tools and come across a great coupon: consider Picaboo, it is our top pick. Although Picaboo offers more photo editing tools than any other service we tested, it has slower image upload speeds, no smartphone upload options, and some design choices (including some stickers that look like 1990s clip art) It feels cheesy and dated. The pages of Picaboo book are slightly thicker than Mixbook, but the cover is thinner. If you find a great deal from Picaboo, we think most people will not be bothered by these flaws, and the end result will be almost as good as our preferred product.
A book delivered by Snapfish is almost identical to a book sent by Wal-Mart—even the packaging. But it also has the same printing defects-dull photos, thin pages, thin covers-the price is twice as much. We love how easy it is to import photos from various social media and online photo storage options and a wide range of photo editing tools. But other aspects of the user experience, such as using layout options, feel awkward. Snapfish also sent us the most promotional emails after we placed an order-an annoying rate every day.
Although Shutterfly was the first choice before, the image quality is not our favorite among the flat-lay books we created recently. Some images do not match at the seams, and the trend of magenta tones makes our image look warmer than the original image. We also found that the software is not as intuitive as other services, although it does provide convenient hints throughout the creation process.
We were attracted by Artifact Uprising's professional-looking books and elegant websites, but it was much more expensive than the other services we considered. Artifact Uprising also has at least 50 pages (compared to the minimum 20 pages for all other services). This may be fine for larger projects, but in the last round of testing, our tester manual left an extra page.
For people who already use Google Photos to back up their images, Google Photos is the path of least resistance. Although it is a fast and brainless solution, the automated process has little control or creativity. The photos are automatically filled in chronological order, and if you want a different format, moving the image can become a hassle. If all of your photos are not yet stored in Google, there is an additional step in the process. Layout and design options are limited, and there are no image editing tools.
We also looked at Amazon Prints. Like the Google option, if you already use it to store photos, creating it with this service is a breeze. Online software allows slightly more control over image placement, but without image editing tools, overall design options are not enough.
Apple also allows you to use the Motif application to create albums directly from photos. But like Google and Amazon's solutions, this option is very platform-specific and has little control over design or photo editing.
We used Blurb to make two books-one using the web-based software Bookify, and the other using the downloadable software BookWright. We are disappointed with the options available in Bookify; there are few layouts, and they have too many blanks that we like. We also encountered a major glitch with subtitles. We cannot paste text into the box without receiving an error message; this is especially frustrating because Bookify does not provide spell checking. On the other hand, the downloadable software BookWright offers a large number of design options, including layout and fonts, with few failures (but still no spell check). BookWright reminds us a lot of Photoshop or InDesign, so if you have used these programs before, you may be familiar with the added controls. We also like that Blurb allows you to upload PDF to create your book, and it provides plugins for Adobe InDesign and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Blurb's BookWright may be a good choice for amateur photographers or anyone who wants to print a series of books.
The National Photo Lab is the best online photo printing service we have chosen. It provides some of the most accurate colors of all the photo books we have tested, although the cover image looks blurry and less clear than the Shutterfly and Apple covers. But the biggest problem is the roughness of the photo book software, which requires you to upload the photos one by one to the selected layout. After making a photo album with a tool that can upload dozens of photos at once and organize them to arrange books, I can't imagine going back. Adding a title is also difficult, because the default box is small and difficult to read and click.
Sabrina Imbler contributed to an earlier version of this guide.
Erin Lodi is a freelance writer who reports on cameras and camera accessories at Wirecutter. She started her career as a photojournalist shooting films in newspapers and was a moving image editor for DPReview. She is also a professional photographer, making a living shooting rock stars and humpback whales.
Ben Keough and Erin Lodi
After six quarters of testing, Simply to Impress is still our first choice for choosing the best photo card printing service.
We spent more than 40 hours researching and comparing, and we found that the National Photo Lab is the best online photo printing service.
Authors: Ellen Lee and Wirecutter Staff
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