13. Unibind PhotoBook Creator

by Barry Gerber

Fewer and fewer people are printing their photos, because more and more photos are being sent or displayed by way of the Internet. Commercial photo printers are concerned about this state of affairs and are now producing photo books, hoping that these will create new demand for printed images. They are finding that themed photo books, with subjects such as vacations, weddings and other special events, are the biggest sellers. You can upload digital images to commercial sites, layout pages and print your photo book. That's cool, but what if you want to do it yourself? Enter Unibind's PhotoBook Creator.

The PhotoBook Creator kit comes with a single one-piece 8.5 x 11 inch album cover (front and back covers with a .25 inch spine), a simple heat binding tool and a CD with ArcSoft's Collage Creator software. You use your own paper and, if you like, your own image editing and layout software to print out pages for your album. Then you put the pages into the album, plug in the binder, place your album into the binding tool and wait until the red binding-in-progress light turns green, indicating that the album will be cool enough to handle in about two minutes.

Collage Creator worked well enough. However, I'm so used to Photoshop that I quickly exited the ArcSoft software and entered Photoshop to make a few photo pages. Some albums have rectangular or circular cutouts on the front. You can pictorially indicate the theme of your photo book by including an image on the first page of the right shape, size and location to show through the cutout.

As with film cameras of old, you'll need to spend additional money on renewable supplies. First there are the album covers themselves. A cover with a 7mm (approximately .25 inch) spine sells for around $7 USD in quantities of 10; not overwhelming given the nice presentation quality photo book you can produce using the cover. Oh yes, don't forget the cost of the paper and ink used to print your photo book pages.

As an added bonus, you can use the Unibind thermal binding tool to bind reports and other documents. Covers with transparent front pages are available for such binding jobs.