pithydoug Loc: Catskill Mountains, NY

If you happen to use LR CC as your edit tool then use the LR book module. It interfaces with a product called Blurb. A slight education curve but no more than any book tool. Having your photos in LR and doing the book makes sense to have your stuff centrally located. The major hint to make the book almost trivial, is to set up a collection with the photos going in the book, put them in the order you want them in the book and about 90% of the work is done. Lot's of templates for one or more pages of pictures and/or text.

John Howard Loc: SW Florida and Blue Ridge Mountains of NC.

I had been using Apple for the design software and ease of printing. Then they stopped supporting the print function. I recently printed a 160 page collection of my work in black and white. Meant to summarize my 10 years of shooting. I used Blurb and their software Bookwright which you can download for free. They have a variety of book formats, bindings and papers to select from. Overall I was pleased with the result but did have an issue. The book was to be black and white and before I ordered multiple copies I ordered a single copy to proof. The high contrast BW looked fine but the images with a lot of mid-tone gray looked pink. I also ordered a pdf copy to proof and was fine. In the end and after some discussion and sending the proof copy back they admitted they had a color issue. They sent a new proof copy printed from the original upload and it was fine. So I printed 10 copies and got a large discount. If you design the book and wait they will eventually send discount codes that are good for just a few days. Prepare the book in advance and then use the code.

mizzee Loc: Boston,Ma

I’ve only ever used Blurb which hooks up with Lightroom.

JaiGieEse Loc: Foxworth, MS

I bought a 10 TB hard drive a while back - B&H had a deal - and I got a free 8x8 photo book from Shutterfly as part of the deal. I downloaded their templates - which are NOT easy to find - and put the book together. Built it in InDesign and generated PDFs to send to Shutterfly.

When I got the book back, there were trim errors - white space at the bottom of several pages. Now, this could be my fault - perhaps I set up the bleed incorrectly - but I DID use their template, bleed and all.

Otherwise, the quality was fine.

The Shutterfly upload process is a bit cumbersome and time-intensive. Had I not gotten that free book with my hard drive purchase, I'd have had the book printed at Blurb. I've done several with them and they do a superb job. Blurb's photo books are a bit pricy, but you can get a quantity discount.

Plus, you can have the book printed as a trade book. These are a bit lower in quality as compared to photo books - fewer paper choices and so on, and not as many size options - but they are still quite good. In either case, you have the choice of soft cover, hard cover with dust jacket, or what Blurb calls image wrap, which is a cover design of your creation directly printed on a hard cover - no dust jacket. I've had three books done this way so far, and they look great.

Blurb customer service is very good, and they've a ton of useful information on their website - http://www.blurb.com.

You can build your book in InDesign, as I did - they have an InDesign plugin and Lightroom Classic also publishes to Blurb - or you can use Blurb's in-house package - BookWright - or you can use whatever software suits your fancy and upload PDFs to Blurb. As I said, they've lots of templates and tutorials on their website.

They'll give you a personal bookshop to market your books, if you want to go that way. The caveat is that when you upload a book, you have 15 days to buy one copy in order to keep the book on-line. You'd want to do that anyways, in order to get a proof. I've suggested to Blurb that they offer publishers a lower proof price, and their rep thought that a good idea, but they have yet to go that way.

My recommendation would be to put the book together and then have one or two others to proof-read it. Other eyes will catch things you might miss.

Good luck with your project. If you need any further assistance, shoot me a Private Message.

gvarner Loc: Central Oregon Coast

The comments seem to assume that photos are on one page and user text on the facing page are allowed by the book service. Is that the case?

stuparr935 Loc: Dallas, Texas area

Be aware, Shutterfly enhances/changes your image colors and if you are wanting what you placed in your Shutterfly photo book the final product will be slightly different. I have made many coffee table sized photo book from our travels to over 65 different countries and only let them screw-up one of my books.... SO be careful if you are a stickler for quality color reproductions. You can turn off one of their automatic color corrections as a global parameter, but there is one that is required to “turn off” for each photo you place in their books. I find Mixbooks.com to be the best printer for large (and small) coffee table quality photo books. There are a few others, but my recommendation is to stay away from Shutterfly unless your photos are just vacation snapshots and if some if the colors change is OK, then you’ll be ok with them...

pithydoug Loc: Catskill Mountains, NY

Absolutely not. There are templetes with just about any book generator that allow text and pictures on same page or on different pages. In fact the text can be in the picture and or below. An absolute must if you want to create a cover jacket for the book or an inside page.

gvarner Loc: Central Oregon Coast

Thanks. After I thought about it I realized what the answer would be.

johntaylor333

Blurb are the best for this type of book. They will make trade books or photo books.

aellman Loc: Boston MA

Great results from Shutterfly.

BOB WETHERELL

Costco

Toment Loc: FL, IL

Shutterfly for me. Great photo books, good price.
Good luck

Hip Coyote

I use MixBook. Sign up for on line coupons.

rleonetti Loc: Portland, Oregon

BLURB.COM
Use their free download program BookWright. Easy learning. Good quality and FAST.
I have over 12 different books on the shelf--very pleased.

PGHphoto Loc: Pittsburgh, PA

PrinterPix has great quality and if you go through Groupon has rediculously cheap prices. Quality is better than shutterfly.