Photographer albums or online DIY albums?

Angel Helper

Hi,  Just wondering are most Brides purchasing their photo albums from their photographer or are you just getting the proofs and printing your own from shutter-fly or other online photobook companies?  It seems budget friendly brides are DIY their own booklets.  What are you doing and why?

fallbride1109

We ordered ours from our photographer but I made one for my husband's parents and you can't tell the difference.  I have a review in my bio.

Photobooks like from Shutterfly, Blurb, etc. are not the same as the album you get from your photographer.  (I made one for my mom and have a review of that also.)  The quality is much lower and we wanted to be sure we would have an album of our pictures that would last forever.

ceeceed80

we are getting our through our photographer,  the company she uses has a lifetime guarantee and really the quality is SO much better. our album is really important to us, so by having that extra guarantee from the album company is a big plus to us... 

dcprep

Our photographer doesn't do albums -- he gives us rights to all of our pics and will edit them on request for the rest of our lives. We just got ours back last Friday, and I plan on printing them myself to make albums. I really like mpix.com and have found their pictures to be the best quality.

fuccisphotos

mpix is great quality, you are getting archival quality prints by printing with them, but make sure if you are making your own album that the albums are archival quality as well, and that the glues you use are acid free.

If you got the images on disc and the rights to use the images as you want royalty free, I would encourage you to find an album designer if you can afford it.  The photobooks, even the professional ones, are no where near the quality of an archival quality album.

sprat85

We ordered an album from our Photographer because it was really important to use to have a very good quality one.  After getting all our pictures back, I decided it would be easier to put all the pictures into a DIY album (blurb.com) instead of printing them all out and finding an album big enough to fit them all.  I also did both sets of parents an album through blurb.  I love the blurb ones, haven't got the professional one back yet. 

HaveAGoodDay

If you decide to get the images from your photographer on CD and no album, ask if the images will be retouched or color corected at all.  If they are then that is an added bonus to creating the album yourself.  If not, and they are given to you in a "raw"state, then you may need to use a professional design/bind service.

Look at www.wedesignalbums.com. Each album is designed individually for you and they can include basic retouching if you simply ask.  Just upload your images and they design, print and bind it for you.  They only offer the rigid style pages with a full page photograph mounted to it, not the flexible paper pages.

Visit the site and if you have questions, just call and talk to someone.

You can get a 10x10 album complete for under $300.

~Congratulations!