9. Conclusion

You can build a photo book easily and cheaply. Without exception, all seven of the services we tested were relatively easy to use. Some were certainly more intuitive than others, with the online services largely performing better than the desktop-based services.

Picaboo might be the easiest-to-use service, with a wide swath of choices and options. The fact that you simply build a book without any concern for the size you will end up with seems a little weird but it does work out. The lack of a page-layout system that lets you select based on number of images is a minor shortcoming for an otherwise excellent offering from Picaboo.

For the pure online services, Kodak’s was disappointing in that it offered no layouts. Lulu’s lack of photo manipulation and its poor service for production time on the photo book are serious issues that put the overall value of the service into question.

PhotoWorks, Snapfish and Shutterfly are all solid services with little differentiation between them, though Shutterfly did have a small issue with at least one picture on color contrast (the green building). The clunky nature of the PhotoWorks interface might be a concern for some users, as well as its lack of full photo enhancement capabilities.

Snapfish is a wonderful system that was easy to use and produced a nice little book unbelievably quickly. It is surprising that the size we received is bigger than the size ordered. Shutterfly is similar to Snapfish and offered an enjoyable and easy-to-use photo book creation service.

All of the services we tested also offer larger formats, and it is possible that the actual production time and quality of those might differ. But on the small side where we tested, the quality of the finished books in terms of cover, paper and image quality was uniformly good. So, for less than $15, you can make a high-quality little photo book that does more for your photos than a traditional album would.