lulu.com rocks for photobooks

I received an email from Mike T. this evening (or, morning, depending on what timezone he’s from)

Matt,

I read in your blog that you used Lulu to self-publish a photobook.
I’m curious, how did it turn out?

I like the book I created through iPhoto and ordered from Apple, but
I’ve been researching alternatives for larger projects. Lulu looks
like the best reasonably priced option out there.

Thanks!

Mike

How did it turn out working with LuLu.com? In a word, wonderful.

Now, I suspect that the quality of paper and printing is higher if you order a photobook through iPhoto. That is, the paper quality is higher, the book binding is nicer, and so on… but, the cost isn’t comparable. iPhoto photobooks are expensive.

I have a 110 page photobook (8.5 x 11) of pictures from my 2 week trip to the Greek island of Skiathos. The pictures were taken with a sturdy little Canon PowerShot 200 (2 megapixels), and it turned out beautifully for my purposes. That is, I wanted a wire-bound book of a lot of photos that I could easily hand to someone when telling them about the trip. Or, that I could flip through; it certainly is easier to pull off the bookshelf than it is to either flip through an iPhoto album, or to flip through a bunch of prints.

Of course, the print quality is subjective, and you may find it inadequate for your own needs. For me, I think the quality is perfect—it’s an affordable way to get a book of my photos, as opposed to a pile of them. To assess the quality of the product for yourself, do what I did: submit a test book. Create a book of a handful of pages testing a range of shots indicative of what you’ll be publishing; submit it, and get one sent to you; a small book will cost you around $5, plus a few bucks for shipping. That is, you’ll be out $8 to see how things will look on a 100- to 200- page photobook—it is, really, no big thing.

I found the LuLu.com setup process to painless, I think they’re good peeps (they were responsive and friendly when I wrote with comments and questions), and I’ve never received word one of unwanted mail from them. (I also like the fact that you instantly get an e-storefront from which you can, if you choose, either sell or make freely available for download any content that you produce. Very slick, and very painless.)

Technology and tools

Now, that said, I think the trickiest thing to getting a good photobook put together is the layout. That is, I really wanted a way to drag photos into a template, and quickly put together pages from a collection of photos. This wasn’t so easy.

I experimented with OmniGraffle; I found that after 20 pages with two or three 800K photos, the program would thrash the hard drive—it couldn’t cache pages (“canvasses”) that aren’t being actively viewed to disk. This was unacceptable—but, if you have 4GB of RAM, it’s probably a great option. Adobe InDesign might be nice, but that’s a pretty chunk of change for creating a photobook, and like using a howitzer to swat a mosquito.

An application that almost does exactly what I want is PhotoPrinto. I discovered it because I went to download an update to PDFPen (an app I’ve started to make heavy use of in the course of my dissertation writeup). So, I thought “Great! These guys already make one great program. Perhaps they’ve got two!”

Well, it probably is great… but it doesn’t do one thing that I want for really quick and easy photobook creation. That is, I want:

1. To be able to create one or more page templates (and, ideally, share/download those templates with/from others)
2. Quickly select a template for a given page
3. Drag and drop images from iPhoto into the “slots” in the template where photos are supposed to go
4. Be able to quickly scale the image and “slide it around” in the template space.

Rinse and repeat. Now, the trick is, if I lay a template slot out at 45 degrees, I want the photo to be dropped in at 45 degrees. If I lay out a template slot that is circular, I want the photo to go in scaled so that it fills the circle; that is, if the circle has a 6″ diameter, I want my 4×3 photo to be scaled so the short axis fills the circle, and it magically (invisibly) doesn’t print anything outside the templated area.

PhotoPrinto doesn’t do this, but… I might have to give it another go anyway. It’s soooo close to my ideal photobook app. I really should give it another go, and see if I can learn to work the way the app wants me to work, instead of the way I want to work. (Mind you, with some AppleScript I was able to make OmniGraffle do exactly what I want, but… OmniGraffle just can’t handle 100 pages, each with several 1MB images on them. But then, it was designed as a diagramming app, not a photobook maker.)

So, that’s the long answer. I’m happy with the books I received from LuLu.com, and will be a repeat customer.