juicesqueezer Loc: Okeechobee, Florida

Wanting to put a photo album together from a shoot and wonder if anyone has used Photo Bucket? They offer lay flat albums, which I like, but has anyone actually used their service and what did they think? Any other vendor to recommend?
This will be a wedding book and I have a dilemma on matte vs. glossy and which one would look the best in the album.
Any help anyone could throw my way, would be most appreciated. Thanks!

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Lay flat is nice, and Adorama now has that feature in their Adoramapix books. Matte vs glossy should be the customer's choice.

juicesqueezer Loc: Okeechobee, Florida

Thanks Jerry! I was wondering, on matte vs. glossy, which would look the best for a wedding album?
I will check out Adorama though.

Morning Star Loc: West coast, North of the 49th N.

For printing photos, the general consensus seems to be that glossy gives you the deepest colours and best-looking images. My problem with that always was, that by the time they had been seen by 6 or 8 people, they were full of fingerprints. It was the only reason I had my photos printed on matte paper.
For the same reason, when I select paper for photo books, I select one that has some lustre: not really that shiny, but not matte either, somewhere in-between. Especially with a wedding book, it will likely go from hand to hand....

Rongnongno Loc: FL

A wedding album made from a cheap print option?

A new low.

billnikon Loc: Pennsylvania/Ohio/Florida/Maui/Oregon/Vermont

:thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup:

juicesqueezer Loc: Okeechobee, Florida

Please explain, as I was asking for advice! There are several companies out there that you place your photos you wish to be included in the album and they process the photos on a paper and include the album itself for a fee. Most of these are the lay flat albums, which are really nice to use.
Are you saying that I should just purchase an album and insert my own photos into it? Just curious, as sometimes you give good advice and sometimes, well................

JennT Loc: South Central PA

Check out artisan state.com the best photo albums I have ever made!

Cape Codder Loc: Cape Cod

Reading this thoughtfully as I want to make some albums.

Chuck_893 Loc: Lincoln, Nebraska, USA

I have been using Mixbook. Pease have a look at this one I did for "Our Kidz": http://www.mixbook.com/photo-books/wedding/erin-and-matt-the-real-album-10178211?vk=c4KEytaABf Look through it at the largest size your screen will handle (scroll down for size buttons).

This is a lay-flat album on heavy card stock. I started with one of their templates, then modified it to suit as I went along. One of the things I love (and I don't know if they can all do it) are "full bleed double-page spreads," that I used a few time for background, ghosted in, with other pictures on top.

I was once a full-time pro with a studio. I've shot hundreds of weddings. Our studio was long ago torpedoed and sunk but my wife kept a lot of stuff, folios, albums, but over time it all became obsolete. The companies that made the stuff were out of business. We couldn't get mats and pages to fit the old covers we had. When our son married in 2011 we wanted to do an album for them. They had a dear friend be the Principal photographer. She was shooting 35mm color film. They had friends with cell phones. They had four film disposables on the tables. Then there was me, ol'Dad, with my then-brand-new P7000 banging away in 4:3 format. The result was a true mishmash of images, and even if we'd had the right pages and mats----

Well, long story shorter, as things often do, YEARS went by and The Kidz still had no permanent album. They were fine with the stuff published on Facebook and so forth, but we felt they, and Erin's folks, needed an album. But we had hundreds of pictures, in all formats, and some needed major cropping and so forth. I started wondering if the solution might be one of the online books?

After looking closely at several, I tried Mixbook for a couple of projects and was extremely pleased with the quality. Having got my feet wet, I plunged in and produced an 11x8.5" Classic Landscape Lay-Flat Photo Book. Please look through it for ideas. it was NOT cheap, nor does it LOOK cheap! Everyone was thrilled with it! The best thing, to my mind, was the unlimited layout feature: crops became unimportant as nothing needed to fit a rigid mat. I could crop long or square, do literally anything I felt like. It's my opinion that this is the wave of the future, at least for the informal wedding (which this one was). :thumbup:

Ask me any questions you like! I don't work for them, but I think their quality is absolutely top-notch! :thumbup: :thumbup:

Chuck_893 Loc: Lincoln, Nebraska, USA

I almost missed this: the Mixbook pages in the wedding album I did are not glossy, but have a very slight surface sheen with no texture. If you look at the album on line, be warned that nothing looks terribly sharp. The finished, physical album is TACK sharp! The color is exactly as I see on my monitor (you need a well-calibrated monitor!), sharp, crisp, contrasty, no gloss needed, but I imagine some of that will depend on the quality of your originals. If you upload a "downrezzed" file and try to make it too big they will send an immediate warning that you should upload a bigger, sharper file.

Rongnongno Loc: FL

Usually (old time) we gave a choice of albums made of sometime very cheap material to intricate leather covers. Both used inserts and both allowed various sizes and arrangement (limited by the answer selection).

That meant more work to put this together and they lasted a looooog time I still have the leather album I used for 'demo/sample' that was made in 1984.

That now this has been replaced is a new low in quality (even if the cheap one were rather ugly)

travelerted Loc: Nashville, Tennessee

Just received a book I 'made' with Shutterfly. The quality was very good (I've had several others from them), customer service is great, they often have special sales which cuts the price. I ordered a lay flat book with matt finish all the way through. The book was of our 50th wedding celebration we had in Tuscany and I can't count the times my wife has looked at it and tolm me what a treasure it is to her. The book, when finished, can be viewed by others without a fee also.
A lot different than it used to be with the old style albums.

juicesqueezer Loc: Okeechobee, Florida

Thank you to everyone for your thoughtful answers. I will be busy the next few days checking out these sites and making a decision on the album.

juicesqueezer Loc: Okeechobee, Florida

Chuck; thank you for the link. Very nice and I like the fact, like you stated, any size will work. Nicely done!