Make-Your-Own-Album?

calindi

Our photographer quoted their price - reasonable, and well within our budget!  And then they quoted the album cost - $1000!  For a book!  I love photographs as much as the next person, but I'm choking on that price.

Any insight on a website or service to make your own album?  We'll have rights to all our photographs, and we have graphic design background (and the fact that I work for a magazine and have our layout editor ready to help for free). 

What's the comparative advantage of going with your photographer versus doing one yourself? 

SJBNJB

The quality of the album you'll end up with.  Most albums available to the average consumer aren't printed on photo paper, and you are sometimes limited with the layout options.  Albums available through photographers are printed on photo paper, which maintains the color integrity of your images, which are then mounted on a thicker page, are many times not template driven but designed free hand and the binding of the book is much better.  Professional albums are designed to last for years to come, and sometimes their consumer counterpoints just don't have the same lasting power.  However, in the end it is up to your budget and what you are comfortable paying. If you end up designing your own, I'm sure there are companies out there that can provide a great product, and with your design background I'm sure it will look great.  Good luck with whatever you decide!

fallbride1109

I made a professional quality album for my husband's parents using somersetalbums.com.  I have a review and pictures in my married bio under DIY album.  It was beautiful and you could hardly tell the difference between the one I made and the one we got from our photographer.  The one I made was $400.

http://110709wedding.weebly.com/diy-album.html

BBoop519

I'm not sure of advantages one way or the other. I already make my own albums from other trips and use a site called MyPublisher.com they are very reasonable and sign up for emails and you always get coupons. ill probably end up making my own because i'm on a tight budget.

rcj2rcd

For the wedding, an album is included in my package and I am having an album made for my parents and in-laws.

However, for our engagement pictures, I just couldn't justify the cost, so, I made albums myself on Shutterfly. They were about $50 each (1/2 off sale at Christmas) and they came out beautiful.

I'm definitely not claiming they were as nice as if I had gotten them done through a professional, but I'm very happy with them.

TheNellieBeast

A friend of mine used blurb.com and I must say, it came out amazing! It's like a publishing online service, you can make albums, or whatever kind of book you want actually. They have an online editor thats pretty easy to use with nice wedding layouts and everything, and you have options for the size, shape, number of pages, cover of the final album and that sets your price. I think the biggest one was less than 200, and smalled ones were as little as 12 bucks. Def. worth checking out.

untherapy

A cool site to check out for comparison shopping is http://www.photobookgirl.com - reviews, pictures, coupons, etc for basically every photobook company you can think of.

There are lots of options for quality flush-mount albums at $400 or less....don't pay $1000 for an album unless it's like 80 pages!

monique026

blurb.com all the way! 

raspberrytart

You usually see the $1000+ prices on leather-bound albums with flush-mount pages (those are the really thick pages with very little seam in the middle of the book), maybe printed on a pearlescent or metallic paper.  

If you are looking for a more simple cover and just want regular, glossy pages, then blurb and shutterfly are great resources.  If you want the fancier thing, you may need to shop around more.  I've been looking for a good, inexpensive flush-mount resource myself but haven't found one yet that made me go "wow".