4. Snapfish

The first bunch of purely Web-based book creation tools we’ll look at are offshoots from popular online photo printing services that offer photo books as an add-on photo printing service.

First up is HP’s Snapfish service, which we reviewed last year as part of our roundup of online photo finishing services.

The cheapest size of photo book Snapfish makes is a 2x3 mini book (starting at $5.99), then a 5x7-inch every-day photo book (starting at $11.99) and an 8x8 storybook (starting at $24.99). For the purposes of this review and trying to keep the same baseline sizing and pricing, we built a 5x7-inch book.

Snapfish’s photo book templates go beyond the basic event-based background — this site includes a licensed character template from “Shrek.”

Snapfish has an auto-populate feature, but it is missing the StoryFlow capability that Picaboo provides. This means the ordering of your photos in Snapfish could take some time.

However, if you want pure control over your book’s pages, there is no substitute for going page by page and selecting layouts and images yourself. This is one of Snapfish’s strengths. Instead of just listing layouts in a window, there is actually the ability to filter the layouts based on the number of pictures you want in a given layout. When you’re struggling to figure out how to fit all your images into a small book, having easy access to picture-numbered layouts is a nice feature to have.

Photo editing capabilities include: Rotate, resize and enhance color and brightness.

The previewing capability in Snapfish is superb, providing a real look at how the book will appear when printed.

Snapfish’s ordering time was mind bogglingly fast. It took only four hours from the time the order confirmation email was received to the time the order ship confirmation was received. No, that’s not a typo or math error. We did not pay any kind of extra fee for expedited production, either.

The printed Snapfish photo book we received had a cover that was better than Picaboo’s in terms of thickness, but not as good as the one from Blurb. Image quality was respectable, though as was the case with Blurb, image brightness could have been better. The lack of a framed picture in the layouts we chose for the Snapfish book clearly makes the images appear more commonplace than they could have been had there been a frame. That said, the final finished product is a fine bound book that would sit well on anyone’s coffee table.

There was, however, a surprise. We ordered a 5x7-inch book but we received a book that was actually 6x9 inches! At the time of this review there wasn’t an option for ordering a 6x9 book, and we were only charged for the 5x7 size. This was a nice surprise, but definitely unexpected.

For the sake of comparison, here’s a picture of the Snapfish book (bottom) with the Kodak photo book (top) that we’ll look at in the next section (the Kodak book is a true 5x7) — Snapfish is quite a bit bigger.