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Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Photoworks Photo Books by American Greetings : A Father's Day Gift

I am usually the one who starts thinking about special occasions and gifts early on yet ends up scrambling at the last minute. In an effort to avoid that situation, I agreed to create an American Greetings Photoworks PhotoBook as part of a review (with Father's Day in mind). I realized afterwards that I was really supposed to create a baby book but I will take poetic license as my littlest was only a young 3 when we took the trip to Disney.

I have created photobooks in the past on a different website so I knew that they can be time consuming however, so is creating scrapbooking pages. However, you do not need any supplies and you can do this without anyone knowing.

Pros:
*Sign up was quick and easy (no need to go to email to activate etc.)
*Easy to customize colors and themes and edit them later as well.
*Generous book with 20 pages and since you can 1-4 pictures per page, you can fit like 80 photos and stay within budget.
*There was a code for free shipping.
*I appreciated that they let you know at the get go that this process takes 60 plus minutes.

*The Upload was rather quick but I would expect this to vary based on connection speed and photo size.
*Love that you are given a preview as you load each photo so you can double check that you selected the correct one.
*Enjoy changing layouts on each page if you do not like the way it looks.
*Each time you use a photo, a little yellow dog ear appears on the upper left corner so you know which photos you already used

*Easy check out
*Reasonable prices

*Love that they call the book my 'masterpiece' when they send the confirmation email.
*Live chat available to assist you during the process
*You can edit the photo via Picnik after you have loaded it.
*I truly enjoy making photobooks and am excited to receive it in the mail next week

Neutral:
*You may need to download Java
*I just ordered the book so I can not comment on the quality, only the process




Cons:
*Defaulted to 'create new album' whenever I wanted to add more photos which can cause you to upload to the wrong album and have to reload.
*Wish I could customize the layout even more or if you can, I did not find how.
*Wish there was an edit undo feature. I had changed the layout on the wrong page and went to change it back but the photos and wording was gone.
*For some reason, some of the photos did not have the dog ear after I placed them on a page.

*Love that you can use a photo more than once but think a window should pop-up simply to verify you want to use it again.
*Wish it had spell check as caught some typos. and it would be disappointing to receive the book with misspellings.
* The name of photo file showed up in caption on some of the pages.
*Wish there was a quicker way to change the cover color after you create the book as it loads the entire book contents each time.

Disclosure: I wrote this review while participating in a blog tour campaign by Mom Central on behalf of American Greetings PhotoWorks and received a free photo book to facilitate my review

5 comments:

Joie de vivre said...

I've been using iPhoto (granted not very often though) to make photo books. It's good to know there are other options out there.

Anonymous said...

I too used the photoworks site and it was better than the others. We received our actual photobook in the mail and the quality was spectacular.

Paula

Jennifer said...

I've been thinking about a photo book for father's day.....I'll have to check out the photoworks site.

Fathers Day Presents said...

Wow,

This is so great!

Hampers said...

Finally, a resolution I love and really want to keep. Good article.

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