I had a nice surprise today when my Photobook arrived. I’ve been wanting to order a photobook for some time but not got around to compiling & preparing all the shots. I changed this last week when I uploaded 88 photographs to make by book.

I’ve been using Photobox for my last few orders, so I decided to try one of their books. They do several versions of the photobook & I decided to go for the ‘Classic A4‘ This comes in  a hard cover which has a window. The cost is £19.99 for 26 pages with each additional page at £1.20. On any page you can have text only, or from one to nine photos.

Compiling the book is relatively simple. You upload your photos into an album and select the album you want to produce your photobook from. Then it’s a case of selecting your page templates for each page & dragging your photos from the album into the photobook template. You then add any text and send your book through for printing (having paid first). My big criticism is that given that an awful lot of cameras work on a 3:2 format, hardly any of the templates work to this format so you have to crop your shots to fit.

Photobox quote a 3-day turnaround for their photobooks. This was where they fell down. It took 10 days to get my book. I received an email saying this was due to one of their binding machines breaking down, at least I got an apology half-way through. The problem was that the standard prints I ordered at the same time took 9 days. Having said that, I uploaded some more prints at about 10am this morning and at 12.20 I got an email saying they’d been sent first class!

Anyway, what’s the book like?

Well, I’ve nothing to compare it to as I’ve never seen one of these products before (apart from a friend’s wedding which cost a lot more than twenty quid!) I have to say I’m pretty pleased. The cover is substantial card, around 4mm thick with a rounded window through which I can see one of my photos. The website says the paper is 170gsm gloss. I don’t know about that but it feels nice and has a more satin feel to it.

All in all I’m pretty pleased. I paid a bit more than the standrd rate because I added extra pages but at these prices, I’ll certainly be looking into getting more.