Websites help you create a personal photo book

Almost every home has an avalanche of photographs languishing in boxes or stored on computers. Now there's an easy way to turn them into professional-looking keepsakes.

Miami Herald
By Terry Jackson
Sunday, March 12, 2006

If you're anything like me, your house is awash in photographs. Stuffed in shoe boxes, littering the bottoms of drawers, clogging up the hard drives on my computers, they seem to be everywhere.

Rarely, if ever, do I look at them. Not because they have no meaning to me, but mostly because the photographs aren't in any sort of format or collection that would make casual viewing or sharing possible.

That's especially true of my digital photos.

Despite the availability of TVs that have slots for digital memory cards and wireless home computer networks that promise to make it easy to display photos on TVs, the reality for many people is that digital photos stay locked away in computer limbo.

But imagine if you could gather the photos from your last vacation or from your child's last birthday into a book.

Not a scrapbook, where a pasted-in 4-by-6 snapshot will eventually come loose and fall out, but a bound book with glossy pages and captions that tell anyone who looks that the strange man in the checked sports coat is indeed Uncle Louie.

Expensive?

Not really, at prices starting at $9.95.

Difficult to do?

Thanks to advances in Internet technology, it's far easier than you might think and the results can be stunning.

That's what I discovered when I set out to put together a picture book that would chronicle my 11-year career as an amateur sports car racer.

Tucked in various places throughout my house I had hundreds of photos, ranging from snapshots to 8 ½-by-11 action pictures to scores of digital images, taken at various races and events.

Sure, I had a scrapbook that held a fraction of the photos, but I wanted something with more permanence, something that made a bolder statement about this period in my life, something I could easily bore dinner guests with.

A little Google research turned up at least a half-dozen sites, including ImageStation, MyPublisher, Ofoto, Shutterfly and Snapfish, that promised to make me a professional quality book.

At the low end, prices start at about $10. For that you can get an 8- by 6-inch softcover book with 20 pages that can hold as many as 80 photographs. For about $60, you can get a hardcover book with 20 pages that can hold as many as 240 pictures.

In between are other sizes and formats, and nearly all can be expanded to hold more pages and photos for extra cost.

After looking at several sites, I settled on MyPublisher (www.mypublisher.com), largely because their top-of-the-line 16- by 12-inch book had a great cut-out cover that showed the image on the first page and was bound in linen.

After downloading the bookmaker software, I set about gathering the photos I wanted. Most were digital and already in my computer; I scanned in the others.

Once you've picked your photos, MyPublisher's software will scoop them into a book format. Then you can go page by page and use various templates to position the photos.

You can put a single photo on a page and do what's called a ''full bleed,'' meaning the picture will fill the page. You can put as many as 12 photos on a page, or a smaller number in various sizes.

It will tell you if you're trying to enlarge a photo to a point it would lose its detail. Limited cropping and editing can be done, but if a photo needs work it's best done with PhotoShop or some other editing software before putting it in the book.

There's room for captions and you can choose from several fonts. It's easy to add pages -- too easy, perhaps, because that will drive up the cost.

When you're done, you just upload the book to MyPublisher's website and three to seven days later the book is delivered.

My book, which cost about $78 after I added pages and paid for shipping, was nothing short of amazing. The paper stock was high-quality heavy gloss, and the black linen cover -- other colors are available -- was classy.

If I want to get another copy, I can order it from the website without having to upload the contents again. If I want to redo the book, the basics remain in my computer.

Carl Navarre, CEO and founder of MyPublisher, says that he started making his own photo books and giving them as gifts in the early 1990s while at Atlantic Monthly Press.

Reaction from friends and family convinced him to start MyPublisher, at first offering do-it-yourself kits through photo processing stores. People would send in their photos and then MyPublisher would send back the finished product.

''People loved getting these books, but it was way too hard,'' Navarre says. Even so, he sold about 750,000 books.

``Then, boom! Around 1999 digital photography started happening and we phased out all our off-line stuff and focused on building an online website and book-making software.''

While the layout and printing of the books are handled electronically, the binding and finishing still involves humans, says Navarre, who employs about 200 people at plants in New York and England.

He said his business is booming -- he expects to sell more than a million books this year -- and is being driven by the conundrum of digital photography: ``People have all these digital photos and the question is, what do we do with them?''

He says that even when people go to the trouble of making prints of their digital pictures the photos still wind up as shoe box flotsam. ''The 4-by-6 print is not such a valuable thing,'' Navarre says.

``But a book -- that's something special, something you can display or put on a coffee table or give as gifts.''