Help me find a site for printing a book from my digital photos

In My Humble Opinion
1

I want to print out some of my digital photos in a handsome book. I habitually use shutterfly.com for ordering copies of my digital photographs, but the only books they offer are spiral bound, which do not offer the requisite elegant look for my masterpieces.

Having a Macintosh, my first thought was to design the book through iPhoto. But I noticed a fatal flaw in my plan - on my home computer, to be different, I installed the OS in french, and therefore iPhoto, thinking that I am located in some european country, doesn’t have the button that will invoke the “design a book” function. :frowning: I found another site, http://www.mypublisher.com, through a Yahoo! search, but I wasn’t happy with their editing features (the applet seemed to be very slow and when I clicked on certain buttons nothing seemed to happen.)

Does anyone know of a good method to accomplish what I want? I would prefer a piece of software that I could download to my local machine, design the book on my home computer, and then upload the completed book for printing, since I think that would be easier. Macintosh OS X compatibility would be excellent but is not an absolute requirement.

P.S. If anyone knows of a way to convince the french version of iPhoto that I should be allowed to create a book, I would be grateful. I suppose I could try installing the english version of iPhoto alongside the French OSX. Perhaps this solution merits further investigation.

2

I don’t know if you want to mess around with doing the printing yourself, but you can pick up an Epson 820 for under a hundred bucks, and get hold of some double sided photo paper for ~$15 / 20 sheets. The Epson prints on Matte paper have a life expectancy of ~25 years. Then you could have the results bound at Kinkos (or even somewhere better). Are you trying to put more than one photo on each page? That would make things slightly more complex, but you should still be able to lay out each page individually. Unfortuantely, I’m not familiar with iPhoto software, but I know you could manage what you’re trying to do in Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, and lots of other editing proggies.

3

You might also try asking this question in the Pro Digital Talk forum at dpreview.com Lots of wedding photogs and the like over there who could probably point you in the right direction if you want the layout and binding done for you.

4

Thank you irae, I will try that forum.

5

Glad to assist. Do you have an online album of images somewhere? I’m interested in seeing some of your work.