I figured I’d continue the Inside the Album blog posts with a post about mypublisher.com and iPhoto photo books, which are made by the same company. All my packages come with a rights-released CD, so you can opt to make one of these books. The upside is they’re really inexpensive and they’re easy to make at home, but I wouldn’t recommend doing it for your wedding album. Once you hold one of these in your hands and compare it to a ZookBook or a PictoBook, you’ll understand why; the difference is a zillion-fold, and I can’t overstate it. If you want, you can get a pretty big iPhoto or mypublisher.com book for around $100, so they’re cheap, but if you want to create a long-lasting family heirloom, I’d seriously consider a ZookBook or PhotoBook. Guaranteed, I wouldn’t be pulling out my iPhoto book in a decade and be terribly happy. I don’t want to knock these things; they’re great for certain applications and they’re undoubtedly going to revolutionize digital photography — but they’re not quite up to snuff for a wedding album.
A while back I made one as a promo book when I was first starting out. Here’s a detail shots of its cover.
Going inside the book, I’d have to say I was most dissatisfied with the print quality and color rendition (which resulted in a noticeable pink hue). Both are pretty obvious in the next pic. Granted, this image was shot with a macro lens, so what you’re seeing is pretty blown up, but the pixelation is still very apparent. I don’t think the dpi of the printers they use for these albums is good enough, personally.
Just as an aside, here’s a shot with the same lens and same distance of the Zookbinders PhotoBook, which makes a great album for parents, or for gifts. For sure there’s still some pixelation, but it’s vastly smaller. And as another aside, the pixelation on a full-size ZookBook is nonexistent because each page is an actual photographic print on photo paper that’s hand mounted to the page. So the only artifacts you see are actually the digital film grain, which on modern digital cameras is almost invisible.
I also wanted to point out the binding in the iPhoto books, so here’s the full page pic of the above image where you can see the pixelation. It gives you an idea of how big their faces are relative to the size of the page, but also check out the fact that the binding doesn’t lay flat. That’s kind of annoying because you can’t spread an image across both pages. You lose a ton of ink in the gutter of the book. And if you click on this image, you can still see pixelation in the larger version.
The last shot I have here is the book’s binding itself, which is basically glued together much like a magazine. I have a feeling these books will last about 5 years max until the glue starts to deteriorate.
All this said, though, the books are super inexpensive and they definitely have their place in today’s digital photography world. If you fill them with vacation pictures or pictures of your childhood, I think they’d make great keepsakes or presents for family during the holidays.