My First iPhoto Book

iPhoto is a great program to use to store and categorise your pictures. The program allows you to do minimal editing as well as uploading to your .Me gallery or facebook. In addition, you can also create iPhoto books which you can then get Apple to publish for you!

I decided to give it a try and create a book of my recent Japan trip to see how good the quality was as well as give it as a gift to Jas for her birthday.

Setting up the iPhoto book is really easy and it’s all done using iPhoto. You have a selection of themes to choose from as well as being able to format the pages yourself. For the pages, you can select to use maps, photos and copy in many different ways. It’s real easy to use!

Finally, once you have completed your book, you choose what kinda publishing you want. You can choose various sizes, ring binding, softcover, hardcover, etc. I choose the largest size in hardcover. After choosing the specs for the book, all you do it key in your particulars, credit card details and finally press the button to purchase and upload the whole book to the Apple servers for printing.

The forgot to take note of where the book shipped from, but it only took about 3 weeks to reach me (iPhoto states about 1 month) from the time I ordered the book. The book came in a nice brown package and once opened, there was the typical slick Apple packaging in which the book lay.

The book was also plastic wrapped for extra protection.

I was impressed with the great quality of the book. The colours were rich and vibrant, and the paper used was of good quality.

The binding was also pretty good without any complaints. The only issue I found was at the back page of the book, where the seam was pulling the paper off from the hardcover. But this is a small issue which as long as the book isn’t opened wide open, the paper won’t tear off the back.

Overall, I’m very happy with the result of the iPhoto book. I paid about SG$80 in total for about 30 pages and delivery. Compared to other similar local photo book printing services, that’s a bargain! And the best part is that you can to format the book to your own liking and with many themes to choose from. The book is great as a gift and keep sake and I’m definitely going to do up more books. Kudos to Apple for this great service!