Create Custom Albums for Your Digital Photos
Melissa J. Perenson
Do you have oodles of photos that you'd like to put into albums? PrintLife.com, Zing.com, and Kodak.com let you create custom-printed photo albums from digital or scanned images--and you don't have to leave your PC to do it.
PrintLife's PhotoBook and Zing's Keepsake Album both generate bound books. Kodak's Picture Pages are individual, two-sided sheets that you can easily insert into standard three-ring photograph album binders. These Web-based services, all tailored for novices, are fairly simple to use.
Armed with images from a 3.3-megapixel digital camera and some 300-dpi scans, I tried all three services, with varying results. Zing albums are created online, while PrintLife and Kodak supply downloadable applets that allow you to do most of the work offline; PrintLife also offers an online version with fewer features.
I found PrintLife's PhotoBook Publisher applet to be the most creative--and time-consuming. Starting from a predesigned layout, you build a 10.25-by-7-inch book of up to 16 pages containing as many as three photos per side, all for $30 plus $5 shipping. I loaded my images into the PrintLife software template and then dragged them to the book's page layout, which was easy to manipulate. However, it took me several attempts and approximately 10 minutes to complete a 33MB book upload over a fast T1 connection.
Zing keeps things simpler, but at a higher price. When I used Zing, the company permitted one photo per single-sided page, and 15 words per caption; images are printed in landscape orientation in a book that's slightly larger than a standard 8.5-by-11-inch page. Ten pages cost $35, additional pages cost $3.50 each, and delivery costs about $7. You must register with Zing.com first; then go to the Design Gifts section of the Web site, and select Keepsake Album. From there, the site walks you through the straightforward process of building your book via check boxes and pull-down menus.
With Kodak.com's Picture Pages, you can obtain as many pages as you want and add them to your photo album or binder. Double-sided pages, printed on approximately 9-by-11-inch photographic paper, cost $7 each and can hold up to 12 images with captions per page. Shipping adds $2.
To order, just download the Auto Album applet. I found Kodak's image resizing and the ability to automatically generate layouts particularly enticing. When finished, I clicked the Print@Kodak icon in AutoAlbum, and the Kodak Web site quickly uploaded my images, captions, and layouts.
Of the finished albums, I was quite impressed with PrintLife's PhotoBook--the glossy image quality was excellent, and color reproduction was mostly accurate. The quality and color of my Kodak Picture Pages also were excellent, making this service a great choice for people who prefer the flexibility of album pages or want to squeeze more than three images onto a page.
The Zing Keepsake Album, however, failed to knock my socks off: The same images that were brilliant in the PrintLife book and on the Kodak pages were grainy and pixelated in my Keepsake Album.
| Buying Information |
Picture Pages Great quality; easy image resizing; multiple images per page. Not bound; gets pricey as page count multiplies. Beautiful two-sided pages. List price: $7 per two-sided page, plus $2 shipping (unlimited pages) Kodak.com 800/235-6325 http://www.kodak.com |
| Buying Information |
PhotoBook Offline software, multiple layout choices; great print quality. Sluggish image transfer and slow book-uploading process. Best deal for a bound book. List price: $30 for up to 16 pages, plus $5 shipping PrintLife.com 888/591-1187 http://www.printlife.com |
| Buying Information |
Keepsake Album Very simple to use. Too few design options; too expensive; grainy pictures. There are better deals. List price: $35 for ten pages, then $3.50 per additional page, plus about $7 shipping Zing.com 415/437-4709 http://www.zing.com |