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
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
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5 comments:
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.
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
I've been thinking about a photo book for father's day.....I'll have to check out the photoworks site.
Wow,
This is so great!
Finally, a resolution I love and really want to keep. Good article.
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