Make your memories last a lifetime with a high-quality custom photo book filled with pictures full of family vacations, important milestones, and unforgettable moments. Whether you’re showcasing your wedding photos or capturing candid snapshots, making a personalized photo book is easy. A much more special alternative to your typical photo album, with Shutterfly, you can customize your photo books from cover to cover. Follow these steps to make the best photo books that you’ll cherish as a special keepsake for years to come.
Choose from a variety of sizes and styles, from small softcover and large layflat to premium leather — or even opt for a professional flush mount album or metallic color cover accents. With space to add custom captions and decorative embellishments, there are endless ways to make your personalized photo books one-of-a-kind.
Your photos deserve the best presentation. Depending on what orientation your photos are or what occasion you’re documenting, you’ll want to personalize your book accordingly. Create the best photo book by choosing cover styles, bindings, and sizes that represent your unique style. For example, your wedding photo book will likely be a large and professional-style layflat album, while a book for your kids might be a smaller, easy-to-flip softcover book. Shutterfly offers a range of high-quality books for you to choose from to make your perfect album.
Make your custom photo book as unique as the memories it holds with stunning covers and bindings. In addition to the classic hardcover or softcover books, you can choose from professional flush mount albums, luxurious leather covers, and beautiful layflat pages. With so many cover and binding options, you can easily customize a photo album that will capture your favorite memories in a way that suits your style.
Hardcover
Showcase your photos in a sleek and durable hardcover photo book. Available in matte and glossy finishes, these are a classic cover option.
Softcover
A softcover book is lightweight and portable, making them great to travel with or to give as gifts. With a thick, glossy cardstock cover, personalize the front and back covers of your album with your photos and custom text.
Deluxe Layflat Pages
Seamlessly display your photos with a layflat photo book. Shutterfly’s deluxe layflat styles are printed on double-thick pages made with satin-finish paper and lay flat when the books are open. These luxurious books make for beautiful wedding photo albums and special occasion books.
Standard Layflat Pages
Customize keepsakes filled with your best family photos and favorite memories with a standard layflat photo book. Hinged layflat pages are printed on our Standard matte-finish paper and show off your images across each spread with a hinged binding.
Professional Flush Mount Albums
Perfect for a beautiful wedding album, professional flush mount albums give your book a professional look. These high-quality photo books feature board-mounted pages that lay perfectly flat, allowing your wedding photos to spread across the page seamlessly. Upgrade your album with page gilding, rounded corners, and four luxury cover options.
Premium Leather Cover
Perfect for special occasions, Shutterfly’s high-quality padded premium leather cover features stitched edges and a gorgeous finish.
Cover Upgrades
Add metallic accents, a die-cut cover, or a dust jacket to enhance your cover’s look and feel.
The best photo book transforms your favorite pictures into a treasured keepsake. There are tons of photo book sizes to choose from, but the right size will depend on the nature of your pictures and how many you’d like to include in the album.
Start by selecting your photos. Before choosing a size, consider the ratio of the landscape to portrait photos you’ve chosen. This will help you determine which album orientation is best for you. It will be easier to layout and size your photos when the album matches their orientation.
When choosing a size, consider how many photos you want to include. We recommend no more than five pictures per page to preserve the quality of your images. Once you have your total number, it’s useful to divide by category and estimate how many you want per page. This will give you a better idea of your page count. For 50 to 100 photos, an album with 20 pages will be more than enough.
Square Sizes
Square photo books are ideal for those who have an equal number of portrait and landscape photos as it can easily accommodate a mixture of layouts and orientations. Shutterfly’s square album sizes include 8×8, 10×10, and 12×12.
Portrait Sizes
Portrait orientations are perfect for professional photo books, like graduation photo albums or yearbooks. Showcase your best portrait photos in an 11×8 photo book.
Landscape Sizes
Whether you’re creating a travel photo book or an album full of family memories, you can’t go wrong with a landscape photo album. Landscape albums offer a classic feel and are great for showcasing panoramas and larger photos as you will hardly have to shrink the image to fit the page. Shutterfly’s landscape books are available in 8×11 and 11×14 sizes.
The best photo books have a cohesive theme. You want your album to tell a story, so deciding on an overarching concept from cover to cover will do just that. Maybe you want to document your newborn’s first year — capturing everything from their birth to their first smiles and steps. Or perhaps you plan to showcase your favorite snapshots from your last vacation in a travel album. No matter what event or time frame you’re chronicling, your book will flow seamlessly when you stick with a theme. With hundreds of Shutterfly photo book themes to choose from, you’re sure to find one that fits perfectly.
Use your theme to inspire the book’s design. If you’re making a wedding photo book, you can customize it with elegant fonts and background colors. When creating a book about your baby, you might choose a theme that includes design elements like cute animals and baby bottles. Most importantly, keep the same theme going from one page to the next. And, with Shutterfly’s pre-designed Idea pages plus the ability to customize them, that’s easy to do.
The fun part of making a personalized photo book is designing the pages. With Shutterfly’s variety of themes, unique layouts, and pre-designed Idea pages, there’s no shortage of what you can do to customize your album. If you’re unsure of where to start, let our designers do the heavy lifting and we’ll make your book for you.
Decide what the look and feel of your book should be. If you wish to incorporate a lot of photos, consider collaging a group of photos. Do you share a lot of details? Make sure you leave room for captions that describe your pictures. Whatever book type you’re planning for, you can move and resize images and add text anywhere to design your book to your taste.
If you need inspiration for your book’s design, try the pre-designed idea pages that make personalizing your photo book a breeze. Idea pages are perfect for designing albums with unique pages that show off your best pictures with fun colors, layouts, and embellishments.
The best photo books have pages filled with more than just pictures. No two photo books will be the same when you personalize your album with added art, text, and design embellishments. Choose from stickers, ribbons, and frames to tell your story in a way that suits your style.
Upgrade Photo Print Quality
Upgrade to professional six-color printing for smoother tones, subtle color blends, and more ink coverage on every page, so your photos print better.
Preserve Keepsakes With See-Through Memorabilia Pockets
Add a see-through pocket to the inside cover of your album to preserve keepsakes such as cards, photo strips, tickets, and more.
Highlight important memories by adding custom text to your photo books. Whether you’re labeling the date and location of the photo or sharing your favorite story from the event, adding text gives context to each image and will be handy when looking back on your book for years to come. Fun ways to add text to your book’s pages is to create a travel guide for your favorite destination, a recipe book filled with your tastiest treats, or incorporating pieces of your vows in your wedding album. Get inspiration on text and captions to add with our list of photo book quote ideas.
Whether you’re making a personal keepsake or working on a professional project, there are so many different things you can do with a personalized photo book. To help you get inspired, we’ve compiled a few of the best photo book ideas you can use to capture your memories.
Document your year’s most significant events — like birthdays, holidays, special occasions, big achievements, and new additions — and save them in an annual keepsake.
Instagram:
Turn your Instagram shots into a sleek book to capture the moments of your everyday life.
Anniversary Album:
Celebrate your years of wedded bliss with an anniversary album documenting your best memories and milestones.
Create a coffee table photo book filled with your favorite landscapes and vacation snapshots.
Pet Memories:
If your furry friend is a part of your family, make a pet photo album to celebrate your furry friend.
A Photo A Day:
Record your little one’s growth by taking a picture in the same spot every day for a year and documenting it in a personalized photo album.
Save your family’s secret recipes and new experiments in a photo cookbook.
Portfolio:
Showcase your skills and talent in a professional portfolio with high-quality pictures of your work.
Honor your family history with an album that traces your family tree back to its roots. These are great gifts for your next family reunion.
Scan your child’s favorite drawings as a special keepsake for Mother’s Day or Father’s Day.
Relive the day of your nuptials with a beautiful photo album showcasing your favorite moments of the big day.
Pres
erve your baby’s photos forever with a keepsake album celebrating all of their milestones and special moments.
For even more inspiration on how you can create the best photo book, make sure to visit our related resources below:
PhotoBookGirl TIP: With any photo book project, be sure to save often. This software is online, so if you have trouble with your Internet connection (who doesn't?), you may lose your work if you don't hit that save button frequently.
Recently, Shutterfly announced an offer for a free 5x7 softcover photo book through its Facebook fan page. I posted the offer in one of my June deal posts , but the response to the deal was swift and if you didn't claim your free book immediately, Shutterfly unfortunately ran out of free books.I was probably one of the last folks able to secure a coupon code, which I hoped to do so that I could share this review with you! Although I ordered prints about 4 years ago from them, I'd never tried Shutterfly's photo books before.Here’s the stats: Shutterfly's software runs off their site. From the outset, you choose to make either a "Simple Path" book or a "Custom Path" book. Simple Path is Shutterfly's autofill function which works with up to 400 photos with 1 to 4 photos per page. You have a choice of more than 20 styles and it's available five sizes. Custom Path gives you more flexibility. You can use up to 1000 photos with 1 to 16 photos per page. With Custom Path you also have the option of selecting photo covers in satin, suede and leather die-cut windows. So, if you want to have more options choose Custom Path. If you want to make a quick book of a set of photos, choose Simple Path. Note that you can still make changes to the book if you choose Simple Path, but the photos will be placed chronologically.You know what I chose - Custom Path. I'm just a custom kind of girl - what can I say?For this photo book I selected my favorite photos of our honeymoon to Australia and New Zealand taken in July 2009. We just celebrated our 1 year anniversary on June 27, 2010 by the way!I uploaded my photos from my computer and began to layout the photos. Its drag and drop interface is similar to other sites with online software. Shutterfly's layouts are not customizable, so you have to select from the layouts provided.As you can see from the photo below, the layouts are at the left and the photos I uploaded appear at the bottom of the screen. Notice, although I can enter captions for every photo on page 2 of the book, if I decide not to enter any text, that box will disappear and it will not print out in the final product. You can also check that in the Preview.Shutterfly also has a unique function called the Storyboard. If you click on this, you'll be taken to a different user interface which can be useful if you have an idea of which photos you want to put on which pages. You can drag photos to the Storyboard on the right and it will reconfigure your current layout. If you use this from the beginning, the software will select layouts that fit the number of photos you picked.1) Software is easy to use, uncluttered and has a clear progression of tabs at the top: from selecting a style, to laying out the pages and cover, to previewing the final product;2) Storyboard function can be a helpful tool to help arrange which photos will appear on which page;3) Pages can be easily rearranged - just drag and drop;4) When your mouse hovers over a photo, a box temporarily opens to show you a larger version of your image (about 2.25 x 1.5) which is much easier on the eyes and makes it helpful to distinguish similar photos;5) You can apply some editing to your photos within the program: red-eye reduction, convert a color photo to black and white or sepia, or change the saturation or give a photo a soft focus;6) You can put a custom photo on the spine;7) You can put a full photo on the back cover1) More flexibility with text boxes - I found the text boxes for captions to be pretty limiting;2) Offer fully customizable layouts - Since I'm big on customization, it's harder for me to be limited to set layouts. As with pretty much any company that does not have fully customizable layouts, you can create your own layout in a separate program however, my photo book reviews are geared towards the average user (and likely new user) and I assume that you don't have your own design software or that you don't have time to create your own layouts unless it's offered within the company's book-making software. (Digital scrapbookers note that a separate part of the site is geared towards uploading your own jpeg layouts.)3) Split photos on spine - a photo is allowed on the spine, but what I think is odd about allowing a photo on the spine is that it wraps from the front around to the back. If I have a different photo on the rear cover, even if I try to match the image on the spine to the front cover, the back photo doesn't match. I wonder if splitting the photo for the rear could be a future option, but that's not a huge deal;4) My biggest issue - Allow users to remove the page numbers! Page numbers only make sense if you have a table of contents or index, but that's not the case here. I think page numbers are distracting in a photo book and there should be an option to remove them if you don't like them.This softcover book has a sturdy cardstock type cover with a semi-gloss coating. Per Shutterfly's site, the interior pages are 100 lb. gloss coated text weight paper. I found the paper weight to be very good - it feels substantial. It appears to be the same interior paper used in their hardcover books.As for print quality, all the photos shifted somewhat to the red side of the spectrum. It was noticeable in some photos more than others, especially some of the photos of our faces. If I could go back, I would turn off the "VividPics" function, which is a default automatic color enhancement that Shutterfly applies. You can turn off the auto-correct function on a photo-by-photo basis, but if you're turning it off because your monitor is calibrated or because you've already adjusted your photos in an outside photo editor, then you'll want to turn it off for all photos in the album.How to turn off VividPics for all images in a single album:1) Open up the album;2) Select all photos in your album;3) Go to the "Edit" pull down window;4) Select "Apply effect";5) Click on "Don't apply automatic corrections to picture";6) Click on "Apply this effect to selected pictures"You can also turn VividPics off individually within the photo book software.1) Click on the photo;2) Edit picture window pops up;3) Select "Effects";4) Select "Don't apply automatic corrections to picture"Although the color slightly shifted red, the overall print quality was very good and the colors were bright and well saturated. I did notice some banding on the cover photo and on one of the interior pages however.The book is perfect bound which means the pages are glued to the cover. I did notice that some of the cover was cracking leaving some exposed white surface material in the crease. Note that this is pretty typical for most softcover books and is probably unavoidable. A logo and bar code appears on the last interior page. There is also a bar code at the bottom right of the back cover.As for speed of delivery. I placed the order on June 23rd with the cheapest shipping option and it arrived on June 29th, which is a good turn around time for the most economical delivery option.Overall Shutterfly offers users an easy to use book-making program. The software runs reasonably fast and is easy to navigate and the Storyboard and Simple Path tools can help users make a book quickly, though advanced users may feel limited since the program does not offer customizable layouts. Print quality is very good and photos reproduce well. Unless you think your photos need a bit of a boost, turn off the auto-correction function to keep your photos looking more like your originals.Check out my Shutterfly overview . Show me what types of photobooks Shutterfly offers . Show me the latest Shutterfly photo book coupon . (Shutterfly is running asale on their photo books through 7/6/10! No coupon code necessary.)