Motif Photos Reviews
In the Photo Printing Service category
Visit this website
Company activity See all
Write a review
Reviews 4.5.
6,655 total
Most relevant
Absolutely appalled by customer service
Absolutely appalled by Motif customer service or lack there of. I received my 2 very expensive memory photo books on Monday. They were both damaged in transit and completely covered in soil within the boxes, making them unusable. It was extremely upsetting seeing the books in this way. I’ve emailed photos to customer service and I’m still waiting for a response to what is going to happen. I’ve been a loyal customer since 2018 and never had an experience like this before.
Date of experience : February 13, 2023
Our 2022 Transparency Report has landed
I received my first photo book.
I received my first photo book. So impressed! It was raining when it was delivered. But to my surprise the book was in a very nice cardboard sleeve and yet inside a clear plastic sleeve. The quality was exceptional; very professional. I will definitely be making other books for other grandchildren!!
Date of experience : January 18, 2023
Pages fall out after light use
Pages fall out of infrequently and gently used books after one year. Company’s response: all books fall apart, even just sitting on shelf after one year. What?!? Offered 25% off replacement. We have ordered many books for ourselves and family. Never again. Follow up - clearly a robotic reply from Motif. My name is not Jennifer and - if my reply was read buy a human, they would see - I contacted Motif and was told pages falling out of books - all books - is to be expected within one year. Truly awful product and customer service. Update - Motif responses on Trustpilot are much more polite and solicitous than actual customer service from company, which is abrupt and rude.
Date of experience : January 01, 2023
Reply from Motif Photos
Hi Dyoga, It appears we owe you an apology. Your photo book should not be falling apart. Could you please email us and include a few photos of your damaged project to [email protected]? We'd like to fix this and try to earn back your trust in us. Again, our apologies. Sincerely, The Motif Team The Motif Team
Rubbish! Every year I order with them as it is the only present that my parents want. Every year there is an issue with delivery and I end up spending the week before Christmas trying to resolve. This year again, like Groundhog Day, here I am again… I ordered nearly one month ago now and both orders never arrived No customer service number or chat in a world where both are completely normal for a functioning service
Date of experience : December 19, 2022
Hi Hazel, We appreciate you writing us as well as your patience. Our apologies for the trouble you're experiencing with your order, again. Please write to us at [email protected] so one of our agents can figure out what happened and fix it quickly as possible. Regards, The Motif Team
No delivery, no communication
It’s going to be a month and I’m waiting for the order to arrive. It’s a Christmas gift that may not be presented in due. Based on the shipping track system, the item is going back and forth between two mail centers. Things happen so I’ve tried to reach out to motifphotos several times. I am yet to receive any response.
Date of experience : December 09, 2022
Hi V.Lopez, Thank you for sharing your review with us. We're sorry to hear about the delivery issues you're experiencing. It shouldn't be taking this long and we'd like very much to fix this. If you could email us at [email protected] with your order number and contact information, one of our agents will get to the bottom of this. Regards, The Motif Team
Motif customer service team is A++
I reached out to the Motif customer service team with a few issues with my second order. The Motif team resolved the issues promptly and I am very satisfied with the end result. I received a new photo book to replace the photo book that arrived below their quality standards. Thank you very much, Motif! I will be ordering more photo books in the near future! A++
Date of experience : November 14, 2022
Exceptional Customer Service
The software is very intuitive and easy to use. The customer service is super responsive to any questions and suggestions. I had a problem that was self created and they were awesome in helping me out and getting it resolved quickly. I was able to get my project completed for my friend who was giving it as a very special gift for a family to honor their mother. Thank you Motif!!
Date of experience : November 17, 2022
We're happy!!
Motif Photos program/ap is working very well for my wife, you is the one putting travel adventure albums together for us. She is doing her work on my laptop hence my email address. We have received two of the albums back and are thrilled with them. Great quality! Waiting eagerly for Album #3 to arrive. More to be done after that. So happy that we have Motif to work with.
Date of experience : November 16, 2022
Great photo app for Mac users
Motif is a great app that lets me create awesome photo books for special events or just regular life. The intuitive user interface allows me to allocate 2-6 hours to a book project and get it done with great results. I get tons of compliments on the books I produce. I’ve also been using Motif for canvass prints of my favorite photos too. Highly recommended for Mac users!
order number 324099 issue
I received my photo boom with 1/2 the photos missing. I uploaded and organized 100 pages of photos. What I received was a 100 page book, with 60 pages printed and 40 pages blank. I emailed customer care on November 10th. I received a reply to send them photos of the issue, which I did, but since then I’ve emailed customer care twice more and have not received any reply or resolution.
Date of experience : November 09, 2022
Hi Katherine, Thank you for taking the time to write a review. We are sorry to hear your photobook arrived with those blank pages. One of our colleagues is already working on resolving this issue. Please contact us at [email protected] if there's anything else you need help with. Regards, The Motif Team
It is the results when receiving the…
It is the results when receiving the book that make it great. The only dislike with Motif is the interface when placing pictures. It is not easy to resize pictures. I crop pictures in Lightroom, but not to standard ratios, so when I bring them into Motif I may have to resize them. Not easy. I wish Motif had the same interface as the now defunct Apple Aperture. That interface was much easier to place picture.
Date of experience : October 17, 2022
I like the motif app because it is…Integrated with Apple's Photo app
I like the motif app because it is embedded and integrated with Apple's photo app. Hence, once your photos are moved from your iphone/ipad, etc.. into your Mac, then you are all set. The app itself has many of the features of the established commercial products (shutterfly, etc..). Also, customer support was very helpful in recognizing my request as a repeat customer to provide a promo code to make my album price competitive. My 100 pages album turned out great!!!
Date of experience : November 01, 2022
Great product
Great product, easy to use. Very helpful photo editing and quality alerts enabling you get the best out of your photos. Clear cost illustration as you progress. A very reasonable turn around for the book's delivery. The book is very well made and should last. A needed improvement is the choice of fixed photo page options.
Date of experience : November 10, 2022
Good Quality Printing and Production
I thought….. WOW when I opened the packaging on receiving my printed book from Motif. I had spent a-lot of time creating the artwork for my 24 page hard backed memory book and the quality of printing, binding and production did not disappoint. My book is 25cm square and I was nicely surprised that it had a dust jacket which I didn’t expect. It was also well printed on good quality stock. I’d previously had a soft covered A5 book printed by Motif and it wasn’t as good as this. Very happy this time. 👍
Our memories preserved beautifully
Just as good if not better than my old iPhotos books. I went searching for a similar product and Motif met my high standards and criteria. Great customer service response to a question as well. We had a great trip and Motif helped us preserve those memories beautifully.
Date of experience : November 12, 2022
The print quality is excellent
The print quality is excellent, which to me is the most important thing. The process of producing the calendar was easy to do and sufficiently flexible to acheive the desired result/design. Arrived in good time from online purchase date to arrival at our home address.
Date of experience : November 25, 2022
You want suggestions for improvement so…
You want suggestions for improvement so here goes! It all went well until I was finished! It's a real pain to have to put my name, billing address, AND Visa information on EACH individual calendar order. Why not arrange it so there's only one time I must put this information for ALL 5 of the calendars I ordered? This would speed up the process on my end and make it easier.
Date of experience : November 04, 2022
Mostly excellent
Generally it's very good and certainly the best I have found. It integrates reasonably well with Photos. My biggest issue with it is the payment system. It doesn't integrate with Apple's OS and always rejects my personal banking card - the only site to do this.
Date of experience : November 27, 2022
Easy to use and excellent final product
App is extremely easy to use. Good opportunities to choose, edit and, if necessary, change photos. Layout options allow creativity and offer a wide choice. Photobook returned within a week and, as always, accurate and of excellent quality - even when the original photos are poor. Would highly recommend.
Best gift ever
I have been ordering books though Motif for years. They always turn out beautiful. Everyone I give them to loves them. I make 5 per year of our favorite pictures. I make the books personal to each family. We have documentation of every family since the grandkids were babies. Way better than sticking pictures in photo albums. I gave them to my parents, in laws and each child of mine with their kids. It was easy to do. Takes time because it’s pictures of the whole year but way worth it.
Date of experience : November 07, 2022
The best photo books in 2023: Mixbook, Shutterfly, Printique, Costco and more tested
What service should you use to make the best photo books and photo albums? We reviewed and compared five of the most popular services to find out
The best photo books show off your most-valued images, and also make wonderful gifts that say "This is something I made just for you," in a way that emailing a link to an image can't do.
A photo book also provides an opportunity to deliberately arrange images to tell a story, and to embellish them with creative touches in arrangement, page backgrounds, text, clip art, and other effects. But which photo book service delivers not only the best quality images, but also provides the best tools so that you can put together the book you want without frustration? And, which allows you to make a photo book without putting too big a dent in your wallet?
To find the best photo book service, we created books using five different online providers; this year, we tested Mixbook, Printique, Shutterfly, Costco, and Mimeo. To account for the different aspects of a book's value, we convened a panel of judges to rate quality of the book itself. Then we rated the quality of the software and price competitiveness. (For more details, see "How we test photo book services," at the end of this article.) We've also included shipping information where available, as photo books take time to make — and will cost more the longer you wait to order.
And be sure to check out our picks for the best photo calendars and best photo cards .
The best photo book services today
1. printique.
Our expert review:
Specifications
Reasons to buy, reasons to avoid.
Despite its cost, Printique is our top choice for photo books. And its high price is mitigated by a key fact: Even Printique's entry-level book is a layflat design that is comfortable to view and allows you to see every bit of the page — especially important if you have images that span two pages. Layflat is an extra cost option with the other services.
This design naturally boosted Printique's quality scores. But Printique won all our image quality categories (except sharpness/detail, where it tied with Mimeo). Colors and skin tones are especially naturalistic and pleasing. Printique owes much of its image quality to a high-grade, semigloss finish called Lustre. However, that finish also kicked up the most glare of all the books we reviewed.
Printique's design software is the most powerful we evaluated. Not only do you have plenty of design elements like backgrounds and stickers/clipart, but you have tremendous customization options. These include full control of the size of text, borders, and drop shadows. With all that power comes complexity, however. Printique's software has the highest learning curve of all we reviewed.
When ordering a photo book, be sure to check out Printique's shipping information and deadlines (opens in new tab) , so you know how long to expect before it arrives.
Read our full Printique review .
Mixbook's overall quality is below Printique's, but rougly matched with the other competitors. Its cover tied Printique's for quality and was far ahead of all the others. Its matte finish captured a variety of skin tones well.
The inside pages are slightly thin, but their semi-gloss finish produces strong contrast. Colors and skin tone quality is about average. Unfortunately, Mixbook's standard binding also swallows up some detail (like a child's face) in two-page spreads. Best to upgrade to the layflat binding if you plan to use spreads. (It would add $42.10 to the price.)
One note: When we first reviewed Mixbook, we accidentally selected the Signature Matte page finish (a slight upgrade), instead of the default Everyday Semi-Gloss. The dull look of Signature Matte made colors appear a little washed out, weakened contrast, and obscured details a bit. In reevaluating Mixbook, we have raised the scores for these criteria.
However, what elevates Mixbook above other photo books is that its software is user friendly and fun, offering plenty of customization options. For instance, it provides 644 book templates to get started. It also allows you to adjust borders, drop shadows, and image opacity. For photos, Mixbook provides both effects (filters) and basic image editing: brightness, saturation, and contrast (a rare capability). And Mixbook's live tech support could be a decisive factor for frustrated creators.
If you order a photo book from Mixbook, be sure to check out its shipping information and deadlines (opens in new tab) .
Read our full Mixbook review .
3. Costco Photo Center
Costco offers outstanding value among all the services we reviewed. Typically, we evaluate hardcover books of around 8 x 8 inches. But Costco's only hardcover offering is a much roomier 11.25 x 8.75-inch, 30-page version that, at $19.99 is still substantially cheaper than its smaller, 20-page competitors. (For the same price, you can also get a two-pack of 8 x 8-inch softcover books.) Costco also offers the cheapest shipping by far (compared to similar delivery timeframes with rivals).
We had a few gripes with the hardcover construction - mainly the fact that you can easily see the book stitching in the furrow between pages. But the book seems sturdy overall. And Costco offers just three book sizes (one softcover and two hardcover). That's far fewer than all other rivals. Image quality was mixed. Skin tones appeared very pleasing and natural, but detail was a bit weak, say in the wrinkles on a subject's forehead. Overall, though, Costco provides an attractive product.
Costco's design software is barebones. It offers by far the smallest selection of book design templates. And its selection of photo frames is limited, with no customization options. The software also has a retro look reminiscent of web interfaces from a decade or two ago. However, Costco does offer a rich selection of page backgrounds (both patterns and a wide array of solid colors). Its clip art stands out for high detail and dimensionality that beats the flat, cartoonish look of other services'.
Be sure to check out the Costco Photo Center shipping guidelines for more information on how long it will take to print and ship your photo album.
Read our full Costco Photo Center review .
4. Shutterfly
Among the best photo books, Shutterfly was our second-best performer for quality (though significantly behind Printique). There was some variation across categories. It earned top judges' scores for paper quality and near the top for skin tones. Contrast and sharpness/detail were about average. But cover quality was at bottom of the pack, owing mainly to an unattractive black spine that creaks loudly when you open and close the book. We upgraded to the company's optional six-color printing option for $14.99. But our professional judges from Plum Print were skeptical that the method makes a difference over the three-color process that most printers use.
Shutterfly's design software offers a generous assortment of 265 photo book templates, as well as a vast assortment of page backgrounds if you create a design from scratch. The interface is intuitive and features a very handy guided tour, should you get stuck. If you don't want to bother at all with design, you can opt for Shutterfly's free Make My Book service — in which designers arrange your uploaded photos into a book in 24 hours. (You can tweak their design before ordering.)
Before ordering, be sure to check out Shutterfly's shipping guidelines (opens in new tab) .
Read our full Shutterfly review .
Mimeo's overall quality was about mid-pack (with big swings between categories). Likewise, Mimeo's prices were about average, for a good overall value.
The book has a sturdy binding, with thick end papers and an attractive dust jacket (the only one in our roundup). Its high-quality pages have a smooth, matte finish to reduce glare. Images appear sharp, with good detail and strong (but not too strong) contrast. While colors are generally pleasing, skin tones can skew a bit pinkish in some instances and greenish in others. (We're not talking Marvel's Vision or the Hulk, but rather slightly off tones that are noticeable when compared to rival books.) The print process also produces a grainy or pointillist pattern that's not unique to Mimeo, but is more noticeable.
Mimeo's software is well organized and has fun features, including exceptionally customizable page backgrounds and text. Yet it lacks some standard components in other software, such as stickers/clip art. One standout feature is live chat support to help if you ever get stuck.
If you order a photo book from Mimeo, be sure to check out its shipping information and deadlines (opens in new tab) .
Read our full Mimeo review .
How we test photo book services
For our evaluation, we custom-designed books so that they would be as similar as possible across all the services — including features such as image size and placement, page backgrounds, frames, text, and stickers/clipart. We used a combination of stock photography of families — shot under both studio and natural light — and my own portraits and landscapes (some used in previous Tom's Guide camera reviews) shot entirely by natural light. The subjects encompassed a variety of skin tones.
I convened a panel of four expert judges, all with professional experience in photography and printing, including employees from book-printing service Plum Print . (The company is not a direct competitor to the services we evaluated, as it utilizes professional designers, with no DIY option, and often features custom photography.) Judges compared photos across the selection of books, as well as against original digital images displayed on a MacBook Air retina display and a calibrated Samsung television. Judges provided 1-5 ratings across five criteria: cover quality, paper quality, color, skin tones, contrast, and sharpness/detail.
All branding was covered over, with the products identified only by numbers. I also joined the evaluations and participated in the same way, except it was impossible for me not to know which book came from which service.
This year, we evaluated Mixbook, Shutterfly, Printique, Mimeo, and Costco Photo Center. However, in years past, we've also tested a number of other services, none of whom made it into our top tier. If you'd like to read those older reviews, they're listed below. Just bear in mind that the quality of some of these services may have changed since we last reviewed them.
Motif review | Artifact Uprising review | Amazon Prints review | Snapfish review | Mpix review | Picaboo review | Vistaprint review | Blurb Bookify review | CVS Photo review | Walmart Photos review
Photo book quality scores
We judged software in terms of its design options (backgrounds, borders, text, etc.), its capability for customization, and its ease of use. For pricing, we calculated the price per page (as some books offer more than others in their default option) and compared them to the median of all prices to derive a value score.
Final scores were a weighted average, with quality comprising 50 percent of the score, software 30 percent, and price 20 percent.
When is the best time to buy a photo book?
Often, we don't order a photo book until the last possible minute — which is natural — but that means you're going to be paying more for rush delivery services, which can increase the cost greatly. If you want to order a photo book as a gift, try and do it as early as possible. Not only does it save you time, but it gives you the chance to look over the book and order a reprint in case there are any errors.
Another reason to order as early as possible is that many of the best photo book services offer big discounts throughout the year — up to 50% off in some cases, or with other extras thrown in. So, if you can afford to wait, you can create a photo book on the service of your choice, and wait until there's a sale that you like.
How to choose the best photo book service for you
Image quality Above all else, the best photo book should look good. This means the quality of the photos should be great — skin tones should be accurate, lighting should be correct, and details should be crisp. In the best photo books, you should have good contrast, deep blacks, and an overall evenness in color gradation.
Book construction A photo album should also be constructed well. You shouldn't see pages coming free from the binding, the paper itself should have a substantial feel, and images and text should be aligned properly.
Book-creation software You should also choose a photo book service based on its software. Some, like Mixbook, allow for much more creative options than others, allowing you to fully edit the template, easily find background art and more, and make fine adjustments to your photos, too.
Cost Price is also an important factor. With the exception of the most and least expensive options, you won't find too much variation between photo book printing services. However, some services offer options like better paper, different-size books, and things like lay-flat binding, which means you can open the book flat on a table, and not worry about breaking the spine.
- Best photo storage and sharing sites
- Best digital photo frames
- Best photo editing apps
Be In the Know
Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips.
Sean Captain is a freelance technology and science writer, editor and photographer. At Tom's Guide, he has reviewed cameras, including most of Sony's Alpha A6000-series mirrorless cameras, as well as other photography-related content. He has also written for Fast Company, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.
Motif Photos Reviews
In the Photo Printing Service category
Visit this website
Company activity See all
Write a review
Reviews 4.5.
6,655 total
Most relevant
Wonderful Way to Personalize a Card!
I had fun making the card for my daughter. It turned out even nicer than I expected. What a wonderful job Motif did. She loved the card! Thank you, Motif, for offering such a great way to personalize a card!
Date of experience : November 08, 2022
Our 2022 Transparency Report has landed
The 2 photo books are awesome.
The 2 photo books are awesome. The speed from ordering to delivery was amazing…less than a week. The second book was four days from placing the order to delivery I found the program itself was quite frustrating. It is difficult to work with the layout format. Mainly with trying to change the parameters of an image within a box. The yellow handles are so frustrating to work with. Another photo program I use is much more user friendly. I will use motif again because of delivery speed but I will use the rival program for its ease of use. My wish would be a program that is as easy to use as powerpoint is. Customer service was fantastic. It was a quick response and very helpful. Note: I did two orders: Oct 30/22 and Nov 7/22.
Date of experience : October 29, 2022
It seems every time I use motif
It seems every time I use motif, it has improved. It is quite easy to use as well. The turn around time is quite fastand it is so exciting to open these books… lots of Xmas presents taken care of.
Date of experience : November 09, 2022
As always, excellent print quality. The large color photos really sing. This to me is the overriding reason to use Motif - in the end it's the quality of the book's photos that counts.
Remembrance of France
I liked being able to choose the pictures I took to put in the book but I found it difficult to pick a format where I could include some text. And I had to constantly adjust the sizes of photos to fit the format.
Date of experience : October 20, 2022
Reply from Motif Photos
Hi Susan, Thank you for writing this review for us. We apologize for any trouble you've had creating your photo project. Please be sure your Motif is updated as we've been improving the text feature from customer comments like yours. In the Help menu, take the tour to learn more about adding text. If you need anything else, don't hesitate to email us at [email protected] Warm Regards, The Motif Team
The picture reproduction quality is…
The picture reproduction quality is terrific! I also emailed customer service with a question and the response was pretty prompt. I have made several projects with Motif and will continue to do so.
Date of experience : November 04, 2022
Excellent Quality and Customer Service
I make my mom a calendar every year. The print quality and paper used are the best. Works seamlessly with Apple Photos. Fast shipping and excellent customer service. Highly recommend.
Date of experience : November 05, 2022
My Photo Album
The album arrived promptly and looked exactly as I'd hoped with clean colours and neat text. The only problem I have is with inputting text. I would prefer empty boxes and no pre-set text.
Motif app is easy with Apple phone
Motif app is very easy to transfer photos to a book and creates a nice layout with easy edits.Customer service is excellent. Highly recommend Motif for photo books/albums. Quality is excellent!
Date of experience : October 10, 2022
Great product; one little glitch
I've been using Motif ever since Apple stopped printing i-photo books and have been very satisfied with all the (dozens of) books I've received. One complaint is that there should be, in the albums where photos go right to the edge of the page, a small bit of space between the photos that go right to the center of the book (near the spine) because those images are swallowed up in the fold of the book. I've avoided the problem in that I set the photos up like that on every page, but it's tedious to do it page by page and would be nice if there was an option to have, even in the 'full-bleed' albums to have that space already set up on the side of the page by the spine.
Date of experience : October 01, 2022
Family treasures captured
I have been working on these books for over three years. I collected pictures and stories from family as they are a collection of books covering my parents life. They met in the late 1940’s via a newspaper ad known as Lonely Hearts. They wrote letters for a year, there were over 100 of them my mother kept. They were married in Pennsylvania and traveled in trains as my Dad worked for Pennsylvania Railroad. An Italian restaurant was their dream come true. After almost a decade the sold it and moved to the suburbs to raise their 5 girls. As I finished each book I had one made for each sister. What treasures we now have. Thank you Motif for being there for me every step of the way.
Date of experience : October 06, 2022
Great photobooks
The quality of the books is excellent, and the time taken to process and deliver is also very good. While I wish they were slightly less expensive, I guess sometimes you have to pay to get a premium product.
Date of experience : September 25, 2022
In an effort to determine who offered the best individual digital book printing service I opted to order from both Shutterfly and Motif. Motif is the hands down winner! Thank you Motif...
Date of experience : October 31, 2022
I am so pleased with my photobooks
I am so pleased with my photobooks. They turned out even better than i thought possible. My friends who I made the books for are very pleased also
Date of experience : November 15, 2022
2023 Calendar
great quality calendar with ability to have a wide choice of page layouts. However, experience diluted by the cost of shipping which was a third of the total price.
This was a first time for me and I am…
This was a first time for me and I am very pleased with the end product. I am now working on two more. It is easy to do and who can not love a book of memories for yourself or others.
Date of experience : September 28, 2022
Great products and service
Motif and really ironed out the early issues and now have created an editing, proofing and delivery experience that exceeds the Apple app that came before. Thrilled.
Date of experience : November 07, 2022
Memories preserved
Was what I expected and wanted! Perfect price and quality for my photo memories of trips me and my late husband went on! These photos are now visible not only for me but others.
Nice print work
Nice print work, however, one of my pictures was 'blurred' with a vertical line. I checked and my original was correct. Otherwise your product is easy to use and easy to submit.
Date of experience : September 30, 2022
I still have the issue of text…
I still have the issue of text disappearing when I click away from it. Other than that it works very well and I am pleased with the resulting books I've made.
Date of experience : October 15, 2022
- Electronics
- Camera Accessories
The Best Photo Book Service
We live in a digital world overflowing with images and screens. By stepping back and creating a tangible photo book, you’ll be able to reconnect with your images, as well as with those moments in time. And sharing memories with family and friends will be so much easier. After more than 80 hours of research and testing (which included making 17 photo books and consulting with a master printer on the results), we recommend Mixbook as the best online photo-book service.
Easy-to-design photo books with vibrant colors
Mixbook offers the best photo-book-building experience, modern design options, and vibrant, color-accurate photo quality. The service also offers great customer service and an impressively powerful app.
Buying Options
Mixbook makes creating photo albums fun by gathering images from your computer, social media profiles, online photo-storage accounts, and even your smartphone. In our testing, it offered the best book-building experience of the bunch, as well as some of the best themed layouts available. Our finished album looked vibrant, with accurate colors, and had a high-quality feel in the hand.
Advertisement
Budget pick
Walmart Photo
Affordable photo books for gifts or small projects.
Walmart Photo delivers good-quality photo books for the price. This could be especially useful if you want to print multiple copies of a photo book to give as gifts, or for projects that don’t need to be keepsake quality.
At half the cost of our top pick, Walmart Photo offers great value if you’re looking to create basic photo books or you want to keep costs down because you’re making multiple copies. The site makes it easy to design and customize an album, with some of the best photo-editing tools available. But our photos looked dull and muted, the cover wasn’t as well made as that of our top pick, and the pages were thinner. So be aware that cutting costs here also equates to a compromise in quality.
Everything we recommend
The research, why you should trust us, who this is for, how we picked, how we tested, our pick: mixbook, flaws but not dealbreakers, budget pick: walmart photo, tips for making your best photo book, other good photo-book services, the competition, frequently asked questions.
To find out which features are important in a photo-book service, we’ve researched more than 30 companies and created 17 albums since the first iteration of this review. We’ve compiled a mixture of images from high-resolution DSLR cameras and iPhones, selecting specific examples for both color and resolution testing, to directly compare the image quality of different albums. For various versions of this guide, we’ve consulted several experts, including Taylor McAtee, printing expert and owner of Stretch and Staple , a print shop in Seattle. We also showed our finished books to friends who enjoy making albums with their family photos.
If you want to create an album of your digital photos, a photo-book service is absolutely the way to go. Today’s digital photo books look much sleeker and more elegant than the scrapbooks of old. They’re also much easier to replace, if an original gets damaged. Digital photo books can be customized to fit any purpose, such as a baby book, a family trip album, or even a school yearbook. They also make great gifts for grandparents and family. And if you’re a photographer, photo books are a wonderful way to curate your work, in something that can be reproduced for distribution.
If you want to make a fancier book to document a special event, such as a wedding, consider upgrading to a layflat book, which has a unique type of binding that allows two-page spreads to lie completely flat, with no crease in the middle. You might also think about choosing a more-luxurious cover, such as leather or crushed silk, to match the occasion.
If you have a collection of vintage photo albums or boxes of family photos sitting around, you might consider scanning those photos and upgrading to a digital photo book.
We researched more than 30 online photo-book services, looking for one that would allow you to create a customizable book with captions and multiple photos on one page. We eliminated services that draw images right from your Instagram or Facebook and auto-arrange them into a book you can’t edit (like Chatbook). And though we tested one service that offers total, Photoshop-like control over the layout of your book, we dismissed any that looked too technical or complex for someone with no design experience.
Many photo-printing services offer frequent, deep discounts and promotions throughout the year, which can make an accurate pricing comparison difficult. Noting the existence of holiday sales, we can’t say for sure whether one service will be cheaper than another at any given time. In choosing these books, we valued image quality and user-friendly software over variable pricing. That said, we prioritized services that offered basic, 20-page, approximately 8-by-11-inch books for under $50.
For people who want a photo-book service that can create a beautiful vacation scrapbook, baby book, or wedding album, we’ve identified the following key features as being important:
- Customization options: The best photo book will strike the right balance between offering a creative, diverse range of editing options and a dizzying, overwhelming range. The service should work both for photo junkies and for people who just want to make a wedding album.
- Intuitive photo-book software: The editing tools should be intuitive for all people, not just Photoshop geniuses or professional photographers. And the photo-editing tools within the service should be understandable at an amateur level. Ideally, this set of tools should include all the basics, such as a black-and-white filter, shadows, brightness, contrast, saturation, and the ability to rotate.
- Elegant, ready-made layouts: There should be a wide range of photo layouts that can suit any number of photos in a variety of orientations. You should never feel the need to create your own design.
- Flexibility in design: For the more-ambitious among us, a good photo-book service should allow you to design a layout from scratch.
- Print quality that’s true to the source files: The photo book shouldn’t make your high-resolution photos look blurry, grainy, or oversaturated. The book should capture the resolution and colors as accurately as possible, even if you mostly use photos from Instagram.
- Variety of cover and binding options: The cover is the first thing people see when they look at a photo book. So the service should offer a range of options that look nice and can withstand years of handling.
- High-quality paper choices: The paper inside should be durable, of high quality, and resistant to tearing, and there should be a variety of types, such as gloss, semigloss, and pearly.
- Easy to reprint and revisit: Unlike traditional, scrapbook-like photo albums, digital photo books can be reproduced at any time. Therefore, the service you use should save your photos, layouts, and projects so you can return to print or edit them whenever you want.
- Flexible upload options: A good service should at least be able to receive photos from your computer, as well as online platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
- Layflat spreads: These spreads allow you to depict one picture across two pages (without the center crease of a traditionally bound book). Though layflat spreads sound fancy, they’re a common offering from photo-book services and a worthwhile upgrade in photography or wedding books. We didn’t make this option a requirement, but we gave extra points if a service offered it.
For our update of this review in 2021, I used the same set of vacation photos to make 20-page photo books using four different services. The photos included both DSLR shots taken by professional photographers and iPhone snaps taken during my trip to Italy and France in fall 2019. I specifically selected images that can be harder to print, to see how each service performed when tasked with HDR (high dynamic range) images, tricky colors, black-and-white photos, and even dimly lit iPhone snapshots.
We laid out each book in the same order, using the service’s most basic, white template. We also used each service’s default font for captions, sticking with whichever typeface and size were assigned to the theme we chose. All of the companies allow you to change fonts, but that can be a hassle, and we decided the assigned font should look nice enough. We took advantage of special features (when available), such as two-page layouts or panoramic spreads. We also used the default cover and paper options (which were the cheapest or second-cheapest available) for each book.
For our 2020 tests, we took the finished books to Taylor McAtee, printing expert and owner of Stretch and Staple , a print shop in Seattle, to compare and contrast print and page quality. McAtee printed several of the images we used in our test albums on fine-art paper as a control. When showing the books to him, we covered up any identifying marks so that he could give his unbiased opinion.
We also showed the photo books to friends who enjoy making family photo albums, and they provided helpful, real-world observations, such as which paper finish might hold up best in the grubby hands of a 5-year-old.
Mixbook ’s easy and intuitive design software, vibrant and accurate colors, and modern layouts make it our pick for the best photo-book service for most people. Mixbook is the only service we tested that works with photo uploads from your phone, your computer, social networks (such as Facebook and Instagram), and photo-storage accounts (including Google and SmugMug).
If the vast majority of your iPhone photos end up trapped inside your phone (like ours do), we think you’ll also find that being able to add phone images directly to Mixbook makes the design process much more efficient. Using a QR code on your computer screen, Mixbook guides you in selecting and loading pictures from your phone. After you refresh your screen, voilà: Your iPhone snaps are now available to add to your current project. And if you don’t mind working from a smaller screen, Mixbook also offers a powerful mobile app that closely resembles its desktop editor.
Mixbook’s guidance boxes were the most helpful resource of any service we tested. These pop-ups, which you can close as needed, provide tips as you start to build a book. Keyboard shortcuts helped speed up design. Mixbook’s photo-editing tools include the same basic options we saw in most other services: brightness, saturation, contrast, and opacity. You can crop and zoom in and out of photos easily, though the free-rotation tool was tricky (you have to click and hold down the arrow in the circle to fix your horizon lines). Six filters can give your printed photos an Instagram feel; you can also play with shadows and borders, or even make an image heart-shaped. Text was easy to insert, and Mixbook offers a plethora of font choices and controls.
When pulling from an available image library in Mixbook, you simply have to hover over a photo to make it bigger, which is something we really liked. It can be tough to choose your next image based on a tiny thumbnail. But when I used other services, I sometimes had to add the actual photo just to determine whether it was the one I’d meant to include in the first place.
Mixbook does not have as many layout options as the competition, but each well-designed template can be kept as is or modified. And in a sea of other design decisions, fewer yet better-quality choices felt like a relief. Mixbook offers 169 “everyday” album templates, from the simple Minimal White design (which we chose) to birthday, wedding, and seasonal themes. Plus, the themed layouts show actual photo examples, a truly useful feature when envisioning what you’ll create. To upgrade your project with nicer paper, more pages, and better cover materials, keep an eye out for special offers, which are usually displayed across a banner on Mixbook’s homepage and on its Daily Deals page .
As in previous testing, our 20-page, 11-by-8½-inch Mixbook was one of the most vibrant among all the books we created, and the colors matched our original photographs most closely. Mixbook seemed to color-correct one tricky picture from inside the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, picking up lots of detail—even in the shadows—and capturing the bright colors of the stained glass. This impressed our printing expert Taylor McAtee, who explained that the image’s vibrant purples and neon pinks can be tough to print accurately. We reached out to Mixbook to ask about its color-correction practices. And Andrew Laffoon, CEO and co-founder, confirmed Mixbook automatically applies “very minimal” auto correction, and that there isn’t a way to turn it off. McAtee approved of this approach, telling us that if a photo-book service offers color correction, you should trust the professionals to adjust your images as needed.
Mixbook albums cost about as much as other comparable albums in this category. But it’s always worth seeking out a discount, since the service usually offers an active 50%-off coupon . If you don’t see one available at checkout, you can always make the book and then wait to purchase until you can get a discount. This will be especially handy if you opt for upgrades, like layflat pages, which can nearly double the price of an album.
Unlike Snapfish , which took our order as an invitation to send promotional emails daily, Mixbook didn’t automatically inundate our inboxes with promos once we created an account. I actually had to go into account settings to sign up for Mixbook’s email offers (and you can unsubscribe just as easily). At the time of publication, Mixbook’s site was promoting a coupon code for 40% to 50% off all purchases, so it’s possible to watch the site for a deal instead of subscribing to a barrage of emails. No matter what photo-book service you use, we recommend waiting for a hefty coupon before placing your order—you can always unsubscribe later.
Unfortunately, the first album we ordered from Mixbook in 2021 arrived with a bent corner, even though the plastic-wrapped book came inside a cardboard shipping box that did not appear damaged. We were able to chat with a customer service representative right away, and they asked for images of the damage and then agreed to send us a new copy for free. The new copy arrived in just a few days and was undamaged. This time it came in the same minimalist wraparound cardboard packaging used by Snapfish and Picaboo (which may have prevented the album from sliding around in a box). We suspect the incident was simply one unfortunate mistake, since we did not encounter any problems in our previous years of ordering from Mixbook. We were pleased with how Mixbook remedied the situation. Sometimes the best test of good customer service is observing how a problem is handled.
Mixbook’s most basic album option came with the second thickest pages of any of the four books we created in 2021, akin to the pages of a coffee table book. The pages did feel durable enough to stand up to the grubby paws of a small child, and they had enough sheen that we also thought they could endure a small mess and be wiped clean.
Considering its easy-to-use software and the overall quality of the finished product, Walmart Photo offers good value in a photo book. It was just as easy to import images from a computer or online photo-storage and sharing platforms (like Dropbox, Instagram, and Flickr) as it was with our top pick . (Though Mixbook offers direct uploading from your smartphone, and Walmart does not.)
The photo-editing tools were useful and included a tilt function that allowed me to fix imperfect horizon lines—a photographer’s pet peeve. Unfortunately, both the photo expert we spoke to in 2020 and the non-experts we spoke with found that all of the photos, including the cover image, looked muted and dull in the finished product. The pages were thinner than those of our top pick, making them more prone to tears and bending. The cover was also thinner, and we noticed a slight glue defect on the inside of the back cover. All these caveats aside, though, the Walmart Photo albums were the best value for the price (they cost half the price of all others we tested), so if you’re making a lot of books for holiday gifts and want to keep to a lower budget, or are making an album that’s more for fun than archival purposes, Walmart Photo could be a great option.
Taylor McAtee, our printing expert, said that when you’re designing your photo book, you should trust the experts at whichever photo-book service you choose. “Just pick the photos you like,” McAtee said, explaining that because your home computer likely doesn’t have a color-calibrated monitor, the on-screen edits you make could look much different when printed. He also offered two additional tips for selecting photos for a printed book: Avoid washed-out, intentionally very bright (aka high-key) images, which often don’t look as good in print as they might on a glowing digital screen. And don’t apply Instagram filters or use other editing apps that may compress your iPhone files, since doing so can result in a low-resolution photo when it’s printed.
If you prefer a lot of photo-editing tools, and you come across a great coupon: Consider Picaboo , which came in a close second to our top pick . Though Picaboo offers more photo-editing tools than any other service we tested, its image upload speeds were slower, it doesn’t offer a smartphone upload option, and some design choices (including a few stickers that looked like 1990s clip art) felt tacky and outdated. The Picaboo book had slightly thicker pages than Mixbook but a thinner cover. If you find a fantastic deal from Picaboo, we think most people won’t be too bothered by these flaws, and the end result will be nearly as good as you get with our top pick.
Snapfish delivered a book that was nearly identical to the one Walmart sent—even the packaging. But it came with all the same printing flaws—dull and muted photos, thin pages, and a thin cover—at twice the price. We liked how easy it was to import photos from a wide variety of social media and online photo-storage options, as well as the breadth of photo-editing tools. But other aspects of the user experience, like working with layout options, felt clunky. Snapfish also sent us the most promotional emails following our order—an annoying pace of one every day.
Though Shutterfly is a previous top pick, the image quality wasn’t our favorite in the most recent layflat book we created. Some images did not match up across the seams, and a tendency toward magenta tones made our images appear warmer than the originals. We also found the software less intuitive than that of other services, though it did offer handy cues throughout the creation process.
We were drawn to Artifact Uprising ’s professional-looking books and elegant website, but it’s considerably more expensive than other services we considered. Artifact Uprising also has a 50-page minimum (compared with the 20-page minimums of all the other services). This may be fine for larger projects, but in a previous round of testing, our tester book was left with extra pages.
Google Photo Books is the path of least resistance for people who already back up images using Google Photos. Although it’s a fast and brainless solution, the automated process allows for little control or creativity. Photos are autofilled in chronological order, and it becomes a hassle to move images around if you’d like a different format. If all of your photos aren’t already stored with Google, that adds another step in the process. Layout and design options are limited, and there are no image-editing tools.
We also checked out Amazon Prints . As with the Google option, with this service creation is a breeze if you’re already using it to store your photos. The online software allows for slightly more control over image placement, but there are no image-editing tools and not enough design options overall.
Apple also allows you to create a photo book right from Photos, using the Motif app. But just like the Google and Amazon solutions, this option is very specific to the platform, and there’s little control over design or photo editing.
We made two books with Blurb —one with its web-based software Bookify and another with its downloadable software BookWright. We were disappointed with the options available in Bookify; there were very few layouts, and they had too much white space for our liking. We also experienced major glitches with captions. We couldn’t paste text into the box without receiving an error message; this was especially frustrating because Bookify does not offer spell-check. On the other hand, BookWright, the downloadable software, offers a huge range of design options, including layouts and fonts, with very little glitching (but still no spell-check). BookWright reminded us a great deal of Photoshop or InDesign, so if you’ve used those programs before, you may be familiar with the added controls. We also liked that Blurb allows you to upload a PDF to create your book, and that it offers plug-ins for Adobe InDesign and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Blurb’s BookWright could be a good choice for amateur photographers or anyone looking to print a series of books.
Nations Photo Lab , our pick for the best online photo-printing service , delivered some of the most accurate colors of any photo book we tested, though the cover image looked muddier and less sharp than the Shutterfly and Apple covers. But the biggest issue was the crudeness of the photo-book software, which requires you to upload photos one by one into the selected layout. After making photo books with tools that let you upload dozens of photos at a time and sort through them to arrange the book, I could never imagine going back. It was also difficult to add captions, since the default box was tiny and hard to read and click on.
Sabrina Imbler contributed to an earlier version of this guide.
Where can I get a same-day photo book?
Our budget pick, Walmart Photo , offers same-day pick-up, and the site makes it easy to design and customize an album, with some of the best photo-editing tools available. There are other services, like CVS and Walgreens , that offer same-day pick up but we haven’t tested them, so we can’t vouch for them.
Which photo book services offer apps?
Several photo book services offer a mobile app. Our top pick, Mixbook has an app for iPhone users , and our favorite budget option, Walmart Photo, has an app for Apple and Google users.
Who has the best quality photo books?
Mixbook had some of the most vibrant color pages among the 17 books we tested, and the colors matched our original photographs most closely. Mixbook also had more user-friendly software than most of the other books we looked at.
About your guide
Erin Roberts
Erin Roberts is a freelance writer reporting on cameras and camera accessories at Wirecutter. She started her career as a photojournalist working in newspapers—shooting film—and was the mobile-imaging editor at DPReview. She is also a professional photographer who has made her living photographing everything from rock stars to humpback whales.
Further reading
The Best Holiday Photo Cards
by Erin Roberts and Ben Keough
We think that Simply to Impress is the best photo card service, though Mixbook is a close runner-up, and Nations Photo Lab is the best budget-friendly option.
The Best Online Photo Printing Service
by Amadou Diallo
We spent more than 40 hours on research and comparison, and we found that Nations Photo Lab is the best online photo printing service.
34 Great Last-Minute Christmas Gifts
by Dorie Chevlen and Sri Rain Stewart
If you’ve procrastinated in buying a gift, don’t panic. These last-minute finds offer fast shipping, curbside pickup, or email delivery.
The Best Digital Photo Frame
by Nena Farrell
We think the Aura Carver is the best digital photo frame thanks to its easy setup, vivid display, and pleasing design.
Motif [New Apple] Photo Book – Review + 40% OFF
Updates (22 April 2019): Motif has released the 2.0 version of its app with lots of great additions and improvements. Here are some of them: – Motif is now available in English, German, French, Italian and Spanish translations. The language will be selected automatically based on your Mac’s language settings. – Image and Text blocks can now be moved around the page simply by pressing and dragging them instead of clicking on the move button. – The Checkout process has been completely redesigned and greatly improved with more information, easier input fields for quantity, voucher codes and address. – Important bug fixes and PDF quality checks
A few weeks ago I was writing about Mimeo as the new alternative to Apple. Back then I was unaware that they were not the only official substitute. Apple outsourced its photo prints from several companies and Motif was one of them; who now offer identical books to what Apple used to be for those who want to carry on creating the Apple style books or for anyone looking for a nice photo book.
Motif offers the exact same product, the same sizes, same price, same cover, same binding and same paper that Apple used to sell, however, their editor is superior to iPhoto or Photos, it offers far more customisability with the added benefit of editing single images inside the Photos app. It integrates seamlessly with Photos, no need to export pictures or leave the app.
Download the app on this link from the Apple store: https://itunes.apple.com/de/app/motif/id1404636482?mt=12
Use the following voucher codes to get 40% off your first order.
Offer expires September 30, 2019 (Extended offer)! USA: PhotoGuru40 United Kingdom: PhotoGuruUK40 Ireland: PhotoGuruIE40 Austria: PhotoGuruAT40 Spain: PhotoGuruES40 Belgium: PhotoGuruBE40 Netherlands: PhotoGuruNL40 Italy: PhotoGuruIT40 Germany: PhotoGuruDE40 France: PhotoGuruFR40 Finland: PhotoGuruFI40 Switzerland: PhotoGuruCH40 Norway: PhotoGuruNO40 Sweden: PhotoGuruSE40 Denmark: PhotoGuruDK40
The photos in this book were taken with my SONY a6000 in Bari, Italy. To see more travel pics, follow me on Instagram @guy_around_the_world
- Sizes: Motif comes in the same sizes as Apple used to: 8×6″ (softcover only), 8×8″, 10×10″, 11×8.5″ and 13×10″ (hardcover only). It’s a narrow selection, but it covers every single size from small to large. No portrait books for now.
- Paper: Although the information is not available on the website, I was told they use the same paper stock that Apple used, which is a #65 Silk Cover stock, 176gsm in international terms. It is thicker than most average photo book papers, it’s completely smooth, brilliant white with a subtle sheen. It’s great but a glossy or lustre upgrade option would be welcome.
- Delivery: Was very quick from the Czech Republic. Very tightly packed with an outer sleeve on the book. Nice box! Costs £7.25 here, $3.95 in the US.
- Price: It costed the same as the Apple book of the same size. 10×10″ Hardcover for £26.99/$39.99
- Deals: Use the following voucher codes to get 40% off your first order. Offer expires September 30, 2019 USA: PhotoGuru40 United Kingdom: PhotoGuruUK40 Ireland: PhotoGuruIE40 Austria: PhotoGuruAT40 Spain: PhotoGuruES40 Belgium: PhotoGuruBE40 Netherlands: PhotoGuruNL40 Italy: PhotoGuruIT40 Germany: PhotoGuruDE40 France: PhotoGuruFR40 Finland: PhotoGuruFI40 Switzerland: PhotoGuruCH40 Norway: PhotoGuruNO40 Sweden: PhotoGuruSE40 Denmark: PhotoGuruDK40
Web: https://www.motifphotos.com
- identical to Apple
- nice binding
- nice paper stock
- great editor
- no upgrade options for paper or cover
- no portrait size
Watch the video review here:
Disclaimer: This photo book was sent to me free in return for my honest opinion. This is not a sponsored post and my views were not influenced by the company.
18 thoughts on “ Motif [New Apple] Photo Book – Review + 40% OFF ”
Thanks Stefan, very helpful to know. However I wouldn’t consider any photobook company that doesn’t offer lie flat. Does motif or Mimeo offer lie flat books? Thanks for all the work you do for us photobook fans.
No, not yet. PrestoPhoto offers alternative Apple books in lay flat format. I am publishing a review soon.
Is not so easy as you think because “Motif” is not available in App Store for all the countries.
What country are you trying to download from? I know they’ve already rolled out to several countries in EU and I assume they are doing so to all others.
Apparently the apple extensions to print photo books are only available if you upgrade to the Mojave operating system. Once you do that there is no option to make print products via the Photos app. You can send calendars to PDF and get them printed according to some forums.
I am updating the review tomorrow with a full list of countries and voucher codes for each country
Do you have the FIRST TIME DISCOUNT CODE for HK ? THX A LOT . Where can I find the discount code ?
Thanks for your informative presentation. I would like to do a wedding album for my son and his wife who were married in the CZ Republic this summer. Now I can go forward with this idea. Thanks again.
Which do you prefer Mimeo or Motif?
Has far more layout options than Mimeo but more limited to changes. But really don’t understand why you can’t edit the back of your book or put photos on the sleeve, Very disappointing as I always like to put the date of the our holiday on the back as well as photo.
Great Review. Thank you! Any discount codes for photo books in 2019?????
thanks for the review, I just used your discount for a birthday present for my dad of his trip to Italy with my mom this year. Super great software! Not as sophisticated as Apple’s but can’t wait to see the final print. I’ve made many Apple books before, so excited to see how the print is. Good to know it’s not much different.
Anyone have any discount codes?-Jan 2019, TIA
The discount code in the post was extended till summer, you can use that
My first time using them so waiting to get the book in a few days. There were some photos it deemed as too low rez, but didn’t always show them so I had to proceed without knowing which ones. I did use your discount code though – that was super! Thank you!
Also – I wanted to follow you on instagram but can’t find your page even using your @guy_around_the_world
Hi, I deleted my Instagram account recently.
Stefan On the basis of your review I have just made and ordered my fist Photos Book using the Motif Apple extension. I am afraid that I cannot agree with your statement “their editor is superior to iPhoto or Photos, it offers far more customisability with the added benefit of editing single images inside the Photos app.” I have made many Photo Books in the past using Apple’s own propriety built in system on my iMac and found it vastly superior to Motif’s. It was far easier to fully edit the photos even after placing them into the Apple Book (you cannot edit the photos after you have placed them into Motif’s format) and placing of text and text boxes in Apple was far easier and far more flexible than Motif where the options are very limited and constraining. Is it possible to make a Photo Book using Apple’s system, convert it to a PDF and then sed it to Motif for printing?
Leave a Reply Cancel reply
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *
Notify me of follow-up comments by email.
Notify me of new posts by email.
Privacy Overview
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
How to use Motif to create the perfect photo book
- How to use Motif on Mac
- How to use Motif on iOS
Whether you're using an iPhone or one of the best digital cameras , everyone takes photos, regardless of skill level. While I usually use my iPhone 12 Pro to capture interesting scenery, objects, and people, you sometimes need a professional photographer for special occasions, like a wedding. Either way, you're going to have some amazing photos that you just want to print out and preserve for a lifetime. These are the pictures that you want to print out in a photo book.
While there are many photo printing services out there, I decided to try out Motif to get some books printed. Motif is actually the service that Apple used to use for their own photo-printing service in Photos on Mac , but now you must use third-party Photo Extensions from the App Store to achieve the same thing.
So how do you use Motif to design your own photo books ? It's pretty easy, but we'll show you how to do that today!
How to use Motif on Mac to create a photo book
While you'll find Motif on the App Store on Mac (opens in new tab) , it works only as a Photo Extension, so you'll work with it directly in the Photos app itself.
- Optionally, you can launch Motif on your Mac and then click Get Started to jump right into Photos .
- I prefer to create a new album where I can dump all the photos I want to put into a book. This makes it easier to sort and separate. Source: iMore
- Right click or click File in the menu bar.
- Go to Create .
- Move the cursor to Book .
- If you do not see it, you need to click App Store too download it to your computer.
- Type includes softcover or hardcover .
- Size includes: 8x8 (SC), 11x8.5 (SC), 8x6 (SC), 10x10 (HC), 8x8 (HC), 13x10 (HC), and 11x8.5 (HC).
- Page samples appear underneath so you can preview what it looks like.
- Autoflow lets Motif pick out the best photos and automatically arrange them in an optimized design for you. Duplicate or similar images won't be printed. No extra work is needed from you.
- Don't Autoflow gives you complete control over the layout on each page, the photos that appear, and you can also add text.
If you selected Autoflow :
- If Motif decides too many images are too similar and reduces the number of images used, add more to the book project or reduce the number of pages.
- Click Continue .
- Make any necessary adjustments you want.
- Click Checkout and follow the instructions to pay for your order.
Depending on how many images you have and whether or not Motif has deemed them too similar, you can manually adjust or add photos into empty spaces if needed. If there is anything wrong with the book you want to order, Motif lets you know via a warning message when you click on Checkout .
If you selected Don't Autoflow :
You are free to change each page's layout, add more pages or images, adjust the zoom and position of each image, change the size, add text, and basically customize it to your own personal preferences.
- Click on the arrows to navigate through each page one-by-one.
- Drag images from the bottom area into a position you want on each page.
- Click on an image to do things like zoom in or out, adjust positioning, opaqueness, rotate, or even find similar photos to fit the current page.
- To add text , just click anywhere outside a picture spot.
- Repeat these steps until you have filled up each page with photos and text that you want.
- To add a new page , click on the button with plus sign inside a rectangle .
- To change a page's layout , click the button with three rectangles underneath your desired page.
- If you need to change other aspects of your book, click the settings gear at the top, between the price and the Checkout button.
- When you're done, click Checkout .
- Follow the on-screen prompts to complete your order.
How to use Motif on iOS to create a photo book
The first time you launch Motif on iOS, it will ask you to provide your name and email address to sign up. This can also be skipped over and done later if desired.
- Launch Motif on your iPhone or iPad.
- Your current choices are Hardcover Photo Books , Softcover Photo Books , or Photo Calendars .
- Motif has labeled Photo Wall Tiles as Coming Soon .
- Select your photo book size .
- Your photos will be split up by Memories or Albums — just select the one you want to browse from at the top.
- The slider at the bottom lets you adjust how many images you can view in the Memory view.
- Pick and choose what photos you want to include in the photo book.
- Select your theme .
- Do It Myself gives you complete control over everything in your photo book.
- Autoflow has Motif automatically place your photos in the book layout in a way that makes sense.
- Images lets you view what photos are going into the book, and you can sort by All Images , Placed Images , Unplaced Images , Add Images , and Remove Selected Image .
- Layouts lets you choose the layout for each individual page.
- Color is where you can choose to change the page color of the current page.
- Add Text Box lets you add a various text to your pages and photos.
- Tap Done to go back to the entire book layout .
- From here, you can select Add Two-Page Spread , Rearrange or Delete Pages , Preview Book*, **Change Book Format , or Change Theme .
- From here, you can sign in to an existing Motif account or register if you haven't already done so.
Preserve your favorite memories in a photo book
I honestly found the process of creating a photo book to be way more tedious on iOS than it is with the Mac. With Mac, it was intuitive and easy to add images, drag them where you want, change layouts and add text, and edit how the images appear. On iOS, it's way more taps than I would like to deal with, and a lot of it seems counterintuitive, especially when it comes to adding more images or removing bad ones.
If you can use Motif on Mac, I would highly recommend going that route instead of using the iOS app. It just makes your life easier when you want to create a perfect photo book. I ordered one photo book on my Mac and another on iOS, and they both arrived quickly. The materials and printing are great considering the price paid, and these photo books make great additions to my other photo albums. I would recommend giving Motif a look if you want an affordable and easy-to-use app for preserving your best photos in a photo book.
And for those who want to create other memorabilia with photos, don't forget to check out some of the other best photo printing services out there!
○ macOS Big Sur Review ○ macOS Big Sur FAQ ○ Updating macOS: The ultimate guide ○ macOS Big Sur Help Forum
○ iOS 14 Review ○ What's new in iOS 14 ○ Updating your iPhone ultimate guide ○ iOS Help Guide ○ iOS Discussion
○ Best iPhone for photographers ○ How to use Portrait Lighting ○ Best iPhone tripods ○ Tips for shooting great Stage Light Portraits ○ Night Mode tips and tricks ○ Camera app: The ultimate guide ○ Photos: The ultimate guide ○ Best digital cameras
iMore Newsletter
Get the best of iMore in your inbox, every day!
Christine Romero-Chan was formerly a Senior Editor for iMore. She has been writing about technology, specifically Apple, for over a decade at a variety of websites. She is currently part of the Digital Trends team, and has been using Apple’s smartphone since the original iPhone back in 2007. While her main speciality is the iPhone, she also covers Apple Watch, iPad, and Mac when needed. When she isn’t writing about Apple, Christine can often be found at Disneyland in Anaheim, California, as she is a passholder and obsessed with all things Disney, especially Star Wars. Christine also enjoys coffee, food, photography, mechanical keyboards, and spending as much time with her new daughter as possible.
- 2 A history of Apple Watch: From Series 0 to Apple Watch Ultra
- 3 Mobile Gaming is on the rise, with Backbone and GamePass at the head
- 4 Ted Lasso hits the streaming top ten after only being out for three days
- 5 Siri vs ChatGPT: Where one falls down, the other excels
Review: Print iPhone Photos Using Motif
Taking photos with your iPhone is easier than ever, but printing them out is also important. Images look different on your screen than they do printed out, and Motif is one way to print iPhone photos.
Motif Photo Book
First, Motif is available in the App Store as well as the Mac App Store. On the Mac it serves as an extension for Photos. A Photos extension means you can use the app from within the Photos app itself. I printed my photo book using the iOS app although I can’t imagine the Mac version would be much different.
To get started you can pick from several options: A hardcover book, softcover book, photo calendar, and photo wall tiles. The calendar and tiles are listed as coming soon.
Hardcover Size Options
- 11″ x 8.5″ for US$29.99
- 13″ x 10″ for US$49.99
- 8″ x 8″ for US$24.99
- 10″ x 10″ US$39.99
Softcover Size Options
- 8″ x 6″ for US$9.99
- 11″ x 8.5″ for US$19.99
- 8″ x 8″ for US$14.99
I created a softcover book. When you pick a book and size, you’ll have to select a minimum of 20 photos. There are a bunch of book designs to choose from. I chose Black Portfolio. The photos will be automatically arranged throughout the book, although you can go through and change them. Some pages display the photos in a smaller size, and others display them as a bigger size and even different shapes. Some photos are even repeated.
The smaller size options are—in my opinion— too small. I haven’t used many photo printing services but I’d like a photo book where each page was a full size image. This just seems to be how the Portfolio style is, however. For example, the Image Conscious style does show some full page photos. You can tap the Arrange button to add more pages, or tap Style to change the color of the page. You can tap on each photo to adjust the crop, or select a filter which are the same filters in the Photos app.
Another negative was the fact that you can only pick photos from within one album. So if you have a specific set of photos in mind, you’ll have to go into the Photos app and create a new album just for those photos. The name of the album will be the book title, so pick a good one. You can change the book format from within the page layout area in case you change your mind.
Checking out is pretty intuitive. You can have multiple projects going at the same time, such as creating a hardcover book and a softcover. When you check out, you have to create an account with Motif photos, and you won’t be able to use Sign In with Apple.
Once I received my book in the mail I was satisfied overall with the condition. There were a couple of scratches here and there but otherwise it seemed good. My score of “it’s okay” just means that if you do want to print iPhone photos, consider giving Motif a try.
So it turns out that the app can do the aforementioned things. A Motif spokesperson reached out with this information:
Further Reading:
[ Spotify Reaches 113 Million Paid Subscribers ]
[ President Trump Allegedly Ordered Defence Secretary Mattis to ‘Screw Amazon’ ]
Product: Motif Photos
Company: Motif
List Price: Various prices
It's Okay. Get It If You Need It.
- Different styles to choose from
- Fairly affordable
- Photo arrangements can be limited
Leave a Reply Cancel reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .
Best Photo Books for 2023: Shutterfly, Mixbook, Snapfish and More
Here are the best services to help turn your photos into cherished mementos.
Texting and social media make sharing photos easier than ever, but nothing beats the nostalgic feeling of flipping through a real photo book and keeping all of your cherished family photos in a beautiful collection of pages. And as a bonus? A photo book makes a lovely personal gift that your loved one will want to keep forever.
A number of reputable services are available online to help you compile a photo book that can be mailed right to your door. I tested a few of the best photo-book services to see how easy they are to work with. Note that I haven't actually ordered any books I created yet, so I can't compare the quality of the final products.
What to consider before ordering a photo book
- What are the available book sizes?
- What are the cover and page style options? (Matte, glossy, standard and so on.)
- Can it be done on mobile, or is the site desktop-only?
- How long will the photo book take to arrive?
- Is it easy to upload photos?
- How much creative freedom do I have with templates?
I'll update this periodically as new services become available and existing services expand their offerings.
Read more: Best Printer for 2023
Best all-around service
Shutterfly's easy-to-navigate site can help you assemble a photo book with over a dozen occasion templates and book sizes, and it offers tutorials and ideas to help you start entirely from scratch.
You can also choose Shutterfly's Free Designer service, which lets you upload from 50 to 800 photos for Shutterfly experts to select the best images so your book isn't repetitive or blurry. You can customize how the expert chooses your photos, how images are sequenced and the amount of design elements you'd like. You'll be able to arrange your photos, which will go into preselected slots of the template you've chosen. Basically, you can upload photos of your favorite moments and have expert help in making a personalized coffee table book in no time.
You can add print-quality photography from your computer, or photos already uploaded to Shutterfly, Facebook or Instagram. Any photo you upload has to be in JPEG format. You can also use premade embellishments to spruce up your pages.
How much it costs: Without sales tax, an 8-by-11-inch 20-page hardcover photo book would cost about $40 before shipping and tax. Shutterfly frequently runs sales , so you should be on the lookout for promo codes to apply to your personalized photo-book purchase to save some money. If you add or delete something from your project, Shutterfly will tell you that the price of your project has changed.
Easiest to use
Mixbook's minimalist layout makes it very easy to use. The site has dozens of fun photo book themes -- family, seasonal, wedding, travel, baby -- and more specific designs in each category, perfect for photo gifts. There's also the option to put a book together from scratch.
Mixbook lets you upload print-quality photos from your computer or phone as well as Facebook and Instagram, or use the photos you've already uploaded to the site.
I used Mixbook to organize my wedding photos and to make a photo book for my dad's birthday. It was easy to add and edit photos, text, extra pages and embellishments to the template I chose. You can swap themes at any time, but from what I can tell, you have to change the pages manually, though the photos will transfer over. Both photo books turned out great and arrived in a timely fashion.
You can be as creative as you want and veer away from the template as you like -- or stick with the presets. As you build your book, you can click Preview to see how the final product will look. When you're satisfied with your book, click Order to finalize the photo book size, page and cover finish.
How much it costs: Mixbook offers a lot of customization options that can affect your final price. Photo books can be ordered in landscape, portrait or square shape in 6-by-6-, 8.5-by-8.5-, 10-by-10- and 12-by-12-inch sizes. Mixbook offers multiple page finishes and different cover option styles. The combination you choose, and any extra pages, will determine your price.
For example, an 8.5-by-8.5-inch, 20-page soft cover book with the regular semigloss page finish will cost you around $20. Designing a larger book with more bells and whistles like matte finish, a hard cover or leather with a dust jacket will raise the final price. However, like its competitors, Mixbook frequently runs promotions that can save you some serious cash.
Easiest uploading
Snapfish makes uploading photos to create an album super-easy by organizing all of your uploads into a file. From there, you can let Snapfish autofill your photo book or add your images manually. Snapfish has a photo-editing user interface that's similar to Mixbook's, but it's more sensitive about image resolution. Both sites will flag images below the minimum resolution with a little exclamation mark, but some of the photos that were OK for Mixbook didn't pass Snapfish's resolution requirements.
Snapfish has dozens of templates and themes like Summer Snapshots, Grad Nostalgia, Family Farmhouse, Storybook Love and Moments with Mom. If you picked a template to start with, you can still swap pages for other backgrounds or change the book theme entirely. Some of the embellishments with certain templates have drop-shadows for each photo that made them feel more like traditional scrapbook pieces.
When you're finished with your project, click Review and Buy to place your order.
How much it costs: For an 8-by-8-inch hardcover 20-page photo book, at the time of publication, Snapfish charges $30.
Walmart Photo
Best photo books on a budget.
Get started on your photo book by creating an account on Walmart's website . You can customize your photograph book's size, from 5 by 7 inches all the way up to 12 by 12 inches, as well as the cover type, binding and how fast you want it delivered. Since I already had the photos available, I tested out Walmart's Classic Black album template ($18.96 at the time of publication). The book was available for home delivery, same-day pick up and site-to-store delivery. Along with sizes, album templates have multiple options for covers, but depending on how you mix and match, not every style is available for each configuration.
Walmart lets you upload digital photography from your computer, Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Dropbox and Google Photos, but the site will only hold onto the photos for one year. After dropping a photo in, click it to make any adjustments. However, Walmart provides fewer photo-editing options -- a black-and-white or a sepia filter, the ability to crop, zoom and tilt; brightness adjustment and red-eye elimination -- compared to other websites. While building your book, you can swap templates at any time, but the photos you've placed won't transfer, and you'll need to put them back into the new layout.
It was easy to drag and drop photos or swap layout pages in the template. One of the downsides to Walmart's photo books, though, was the lack of embellishments. The program lets you add text, but "stickers," like those on other sites, would've taken the design process up a level.
How much it costs: Once you're finished with your project, click Next to review your photo book in a storyboard format before you order. There's also an option to preview the entire book page by page if you want a more detailed review before ordering. You'll get an alert if you've left any slots blank. Walmart's option is also the least expensive of the bunch: An 8-by-11-inch, 20-page, hardcover glossy photo book cost about $19 before shipping and tax, as of the time this was written.
Best photo books for fast checkout
If you're not keen on making an account and getting a slew of emails from a company, Mailpix might be the way to go. With this photo book company, you can make a photo book as a guest, no account needed.
Mailpix offers premium ultra layflat, layflat, hardcover book and softcover photo book styles, ranging from 8-by-8- to 11-by-14-inch books. The site recommends designing the book on a computer and using JPEG files. You can pick out styles for almost every occasion -- birthday celebrations, Mother's and Father's day, holidays like Christmas, Halloween and Hanukkah, birthdays and pets.
Mailpix guides you through the process step by step, so you won't feel lost or overwhelmed. In addition to choosing how many pages and how many images per page, Mailpix provides guidance on image sizing for the highest quality outcome. There's also an autofill option that helps save time putting all your images in. As you're building your book, Mailpix puts a red line around the page indicating that a section might be cropped out during the photo book printing.
There was a nice diversity in page layouts, and the site warns you if a photo's resolution is too low, so you can adjust. In addition, Mailpix updates your price total as you go along, so you're not caught off-guard by the final price at checkout.
How much it costs: When you're satisfied with your book, name it and choose how many copies you'd like to order. Select a cover style, add a photo if you'd like and check out. The prices for the book styles and amount of pages vary, as with other sites -- the fancier the book and the more pages you add, the more expensive it gets. On Mailpix, every additional page costs $1.20.
An 8.5-by-11-inch hardcover book with a standard 20 pages came to $28 before tax and shipping -- ground shipping is $19, express shipping runs $20. It should also be noted that at the time this was written, Mailpix was offering a promo code for 65% off.
Google Photos
Best if you're new to online photo books.
Instead of uploading your photos into another app, you can create a hassle-free photo book on your phone with Google Photos (it also works via desktop). In the Google Photos app, tap the shopping bag icon (on my Pixel 5 phone, it's at the top left of the screen). Tap Photo Books to get started, choose from a few premade albums based on your photos, like Winter Vacation 2023 (the premade albums can be edited as well).
There's also the option to start from scratch and manually add all the photos by tapping Make Photo Book at the bottom of the screen. You can add up to 90 photos to your book. Once you've got all the images you want, you can add a title for your book, hold and drag to rearrange pages, and further edit by tapping on a page.
Google Photos is probably the easiest and most basic choice if you're going to order a photo book. It offers a minimalist layout on white pages that you can add captions to. There aren't embellishments like there are on Mixbook, but you can still make creative layouts with multiple photos. Google Photos still has editing options in its app for you to add filters before creating a book.
How much it costs : A hardcover 9-by-9-inch photo book costs $30 for 20 pages and 99 cents for each additional page. A softcover 7-by-7-inch photo book costs $15 for 20 pages and 49 cents for each additional page before shipping.
More options
Apple photos.
Apple no longer has an in-house photo book service , but you can download project expansion apps to create photo books with iOS devices like iPhone and Mac. Open the Photos app and choose File > Create > Book . From there you can download third-party apps Motif, Mimeo Photos, White Wall, Ifolor Designer, Mpix, Fujifilm Prints and Gifts or Wix Photo Albums to start a project. Any app you download will be available through Book when you create a new project in the Photos app.
- Your Old Phone Can Still Take Stunning Photos With These Pro Tips
- Best Smart Home Gifts for 2023
- Best Family Games for 2023: Must-Have Board Games
by Jason Snell & Dan Moren
This Week's Sponsor
By jason snell.
November 27, 2018 11:46 AM PT
Books and calendars in Photos for Mac: What are the best options?
Note : This story has not been updated for several years.
[ The newest version of my ebook about Photos for Mac and iOS, Take Control of Photos , has just been released. A lot of the research I did for this story came out of working on that book. If you use the Photos app a lot, consider buying the book . ]
For many years, Apple let you use iPhoto and then Photos to create designs with your photos, upload those designs to Apple’s servers, and then take delivery of custom-printed objects in a few days’ time. My family creates annual calendars and frequently creates books, too. These physical products are great ways to keep our photos in view throughout the year, even when we aren’t staring at a device.
Unfortunately, Apple has gotten out of the business of producing books and calendars. Instead, it’s allowed third-party services to create special apps and make them available for download in the Mac App Store. These free apps allow you to create projects based on your Photos library and order them from right within Photos. (Sure, you could just build books by uploading photos to a website. But in my opinion, building on your Mac from your existing library of images and using a native app is a superior experience.)
Apple started in leaning into extensions last year, but with its official announcement that it’s getting out of this category, a few other companies have finally jumped in. The result is that there are two apps—available for free from the Mac App Store—that are worth checking out if you’re interested in printing photo books or calendars from within Photos for Mac. They are Mimeo Photos and Motif . (Unsurprisingly, the companies behind both apps seem to have been past suppliers for Apple’s book-printing services… so this is their way of staying in the game.)
Building the books
Given what they’re designed to do, it’s not surprising that these apps are more similar than they are different. Both let you build books from different design templates. You add photos to a project by dragging them from the main Photos view to the project’s icon in the sidebar. You can view all the photos in your project or just see the ones you haven’t used yet—a very useful feature, since you want to avoid duplicates and make sure all the good photos get in. Both extensions let you select the number of photos on a page and choose from a bunch of different layouts. And doing Apple’s original implementation one better, both will let you perform free-form adjustments of the sizes of photos on any page, if you think you can do a better job than the pre-formatted templates can.
Both apps offer predesigned templates, so you don’t have to create your books from scratch. Mimeo definitely wins when it comes to volume: Mimeo’s template picker offers more than 50 options (including versions of Apple’s old templates), while Motif is limited to 14.
The apps also have their differences. If you’re someone who wants the ultimate in customizability, Mimeo shines. You can add or remove photo boxes, resize them at will, drag them anywhere on the page, and even send them to the front or back, so if you want to have a complex design with overlapping images, you can do it. (Mimeo will also let you run photos across the center spread of the book.) Mimeo’s interface puts thumbnails of all your pages at the bottom of the screen, with a toolbar at the right that slides out drawers of your photos and lets you select layout preferences.
There are no drawers in Motif, which places your project’s photos in a strip across the bottom and lets you toggle between a single-spread view and a set of project thumbnails via a pair of toolbar buttons. This is a better interface decision, since I’m the kind of person who builds books page by page and wants access to all of my project photos at all times. You get access to layout options by clicking a small icon beneath a page. Motif provides templates for between one and nine photos on a page. (Mimeo has templates for one to four photos, and then a “5+” category with a few different layout options for many more photos.)
If I had to sum up the differences between the apps, I’d say that Motif feels more modern and is easier to use, since it puts project photos (rather than page thumbnails) on the main interface and isn’t reliant on a bunch of slide-out drawers to access photos and layout controls. While Motif offers more layout flexibility than Apple’s old tools did, if you want to have ultimate control, Mimeo will give it to you.
You can try them both and see for yourself, if you like. But at this point I’d recommend that most people start with Motif, because of the streamlined interface. (Most people don’t need their book-building tool to be a miniature QuarkXPress.)
Getting the books
Now we come to the other part of the equation: Actually printing the books! I built annual retrospective books for 2016 and 2017 with Motif and Mimeo, respectively, and then ordered them so I could see how good the final product was.
Both companies had exactly the same prices for the product I bought, a hardcover 11 x 8.5-inch book: $30 for the first 20 base pages, and $1 for each additional page. (These prices seem at least competitive with web-based services; when I checked Shutterfly, it was selling this same format for $28 for the first 20 pages, and $1.11 for each additional page.)
The quality of both books was quite similar. I slightly preferred the spine on the Motif book, which felt a little more flexible, so it was easier to open to a spread and not have to press down hard to get the pages to lay flat. I was also disappointed with the paper cover of the Mimeo book, which I ordered with a black background. All around the edges, presumably where the paper had been trimmed, and at all folds of the paper cover, there’s a visible white cracking pattern. Ugly.
Both companies provided a paper dust jacket for my hardcover books, which I was able to design within Photos. Mimeo let me add a photo to the inside of the dust jacket, which was a fun touch that Motif didn’t bother with. (If you take the dust jacket off, you’ll find the same images on the actual hardcovers of both books.)
What about calendars?
My family still makes a custom calendar every year based on photos we took during each month of the previous year. (So my January 2019 calendar image is from January 2018, and so on.) The good news is that this tradition will be able to live on beyond the death of Apple’s own built-in calendar tools. Both Mimeo Photos and Motif also offer calendar-creation features that use layout tools adapted from the same ones they use for building books.
Mimeo Photos has the edge over Motif on the calendar front. It’s got more available template themes and offers the capability to customize individual dates portion on the calendar, with text or photos, which is fun. (Unfortunately, it won’t let you drop photos on the overflow dates from the previous or following months, which was always something I did with Apple’s old calendar.)
I haven’t ordered calendars from either company, so I can’t speak to the output quality, but my guess is that it will be similar, just as it is with books. And both companies are selling 12-month calendars for the same price, $20.
So while I prefer Motif for book building, I prefer Mimeo for calendars. But I think you can’t go wrong with either option. If you use Photos and are despairing over the moment you’ll need to build a book or calendar without Apple’s tools, don’t worry: Both of these apps will do a good job.
[ Take Control of Photos features a whole lot more about how to use the Photos app on macOS and iOS. ]
If you appreciate articles like this one, support us by becoming a Six Colors subscriber . Subscribers get access to an exclusive podcast, members-only stories, and a special community.
Search Six Colors
Best Photo Album Websites
A creative way to display your photos
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():format(webp)/Camryn-Rabideau-4e069cad1b474d94931269b1e8317dce.jpg "motif photo books reviews")
We recommend the best products through an independent review process , and advertisers do not influence our picks. We may receive compensation if you visit partners we recommend. Read our advertiser disclosure for more info.
The 8 Best Photo Album Websites of 2023
- Best Overall: Shutterfly
- Runner Up, Best Overall: Printique
- Best Budget: Amazon Prints
- Best Themes: Mixbook
- Best for Weddings: Artifact Uprising
- Best App: Chatbooks
- Best for Mac: Motif
- Best for Instagram: Snapfish
- Our Top Picks
- Amazon Prints
Artifact Uprising
- See More (5)
Frequently Asked Questions
Best overall : shutterfly.
One of the most popular photo album websites out there is Shutterfly—and for good reason! This website offers a variety of options that let you create high-quality photo books, and you can also use it to make other photo-based memorabilia, such as cards, calendars , wall art, blankets, and much more.
You have three choices when designing a photo album with Shutterfly. First, there’s the “Simple Path,” where your photographs are automatically populated into preset backgrounds. You can choose from 40 different layouts, and add custom captions under your pictures. Then, there’s the “Custom Path,” where you design the book by hand, choosing which photographs you want on each page and adding your own text and embellishments.
Finally, there’s the “Make My Book® Service”—for an additional $9.99, Shutterfly’s designers will curate your photos and design a book for you. You can provide up to 800 images, as well as special instructions, and in a few days, you’ll be able to review and personalize your album! Your finished design is printed on high-quality paper, and you can choose from different covers, including glossy, matte, and even leather options. Prices start at around $19.99, depending on the size and number of pages.
Want to make the book yourself? Check out our guide to the best scrapbooking supplies you can buy today.
Runner Up , Best Overall : Printique
Canvas prints adoramapix
Another amazing photo album website is Printique (formerly AdoramaPix), which delivers beautiful keepsakes printed on professional-grade photo paper. Their photo books come in more than a dozen different sizes, and you can choose from hardcover, softcover, fabric, and leather bindings, as well as six different page materials. Their prices are a bit more expensive, starting at around $19.99 for a small softcover book with 20 pages, and your book can be printed in as little as two days.
Printique has a variety of templates to get you started and using their online book-building software, you can arrange your photos just the way you want. You can change the page backgrounds, add clip art, insert captions, and so much more, and the tools are all intuitive, even if you’re new to the technology. Plus, many reviewers rave about the quality of the final product, writing that the album is beautifully printed and very sturdy.
Best Budget : Amazon Prints
Did you know that Amazon offers a photo printing service? It should come as no surprise, as this huge online retailer sells just about everything! If you’re looking for an inexpensive photo album or another memento, like a calendar or coffee mug, you can use Amazon Prints to get it made for less!
Amazon Prints offers four photo album sizes, as well as both hard- and softcover options. The smallest sizes cost around $9 for 20 pages, but you can expand your book up to 150 pages. The pages have a semi-gloss finish, and you can decorate your creation with embellishments, quotes, and other designs. This service offers less customization than other websites, but the final result is still quite good and you can't beat the low price.
Best Themes : Mixbook
Some photo album services just give you plain templates to arrange your pictures in, but Mixbook takes it a step further with specific themes! They offer a wide variety of family, wedding, travel, baby , romance, and other photobook categories, making it easier for you to create a beautiful, thematic keepsake.
Custom photo albums from Mixbook start at around $16, and you can customize just about every aspect, from the size and orientation to the page and cover material to the theme. You can upload images from your computer or social media and decorate pages with text, backgrounds, stickers, and more. The end result is a quality memento that you’ll look at for years to come, and this is an especially good option if you’re creating a collection of photos from a specific event, such as a party, graduation, or trip.
Best for Weddings : Artifact Uprising
If you’re looking for a wedding photo album website to put together images from your big day, one of the best choices is Artifact Uprising, which is known for its superior-quality photo books. It was even named one of Oprah’s “Favorite Things,” so you know it has to be good!
Artifact Uprising offers a variety of wedding-specific products, including beautiful photo albums and guest books . You can choose from hard- or softcover designs, as well as lustre or superfine finish photo paper. There are 12 different fabric colors and customized foil-stamping options to personalize your album, and the brand’s Layflat Album has a warp-resistant cover that makes it an ideal coffee-table book . Wedding albums start at around $69 and increase from there.
Make sure you’re using one of the best wedding websites to plan your big day!
Best App : Chatbooks
Want to be able to create photo albums right from your phone? Then check out Chatbooks, which lets you use an app to make custom designs in as little as five minutes! Their books start at around $10 for 30 pages, and you can choose from either 6 x 6 or 8 x 8-inch sizes.
Chatbooks doesn’t offer as many customization options as other websites, but it’s straightforward and simple, which many users like. You can choose from either a hardcover or softcover book, and photos can be uploaded from your phone or computer, social media, or Google Drive. You can have up to 366 pages in each book, and if you’re not happy with the result, Chatbooks offers a money-back guarantee.
Best for Mac : Motif
If you use a Mac computer and organize your images in Photos, you should definitely consider using Motif to create your photo album—this program is a simple extension for Photos on macOS that allows you to design curated photo books, calendars, and cards.
Photo books from Motif start at $18, and there are four hardcover sizes or three softcover sizes to choose from. They’re printed on premium paper with a silk-finish, and the exterior features an anti-scratch, anti-scuff lamination to improve durability. Plus, each book comes with a dust jacket and photo-wrap cover.
Best for Instagram : Snapfish
Want to turn your Instagram feed into a physical book? Then check out Snapfish, which lets you pull pictures directly from this social media site. Snapfish offers seven photo book sizes, as well as hard, soft, and flatlay covers. Prices start at around $13 for 20 pages, and you can choose from a wide variety of fun layouts and backgrounds to display your images.
Snapfish lets you create beautiful photo albums from your computer or its app, and you can upload images from your computer, phone, Instagram, Facebook, Google Photos, Flickr, and more. You can customize your design with text and embellishments, and each book can hold up to 150 pages. If you’re making an extra-special photo album, you can opt for a premium book, which includes a velvet-soft, matte cover and extra-thick silk-finish pages.
How Can I Create and Print a Photo Album Online?
By using a photo album website, such as the ones included in this article, it’s possible to create beautiful keepsakes with your photos. In most cases, you just need to upload your photos to the website, choose an album style and layout that you want to use, and then follow the instructions for placing your photos in the layout. Some websites simplify the process even more by prepopulating your photos in your album or designing the book for you. The service prints out your pages, assembles your book, and ships it out to you.
How Much Does It Cost to Make a Photo Album Online?
Prices start at around $10 for a small softcover photo album and can go up to hundreds of dollars for a large wedding album with lots of embellishments.
How Long Does It Take to Make a Photo Album Online?
Some services are so easy to use that you can put together a small album in 15 minutes. If you don’t have a lot of experience making albums or you’re creating one with lots of pages, the process could take a few hours. In terms of when you’ll get the finished product, most services will ship within a few days, depending on the time of year. Some services can turn around your photo album in a day, if you’re willing to pay for expedited shipping costs.
Spruce Home / Design by Amelia Manley
Oprah.com. " Oprah's Favorite Things 2015 ." Accessed Nov. 11, 2021.
More from The Spruce
- The 10 Best Bullet Journals of 2023
- This Secret Section of Amazon Is Filled With Discounts Galore
- The Best Notebooks of 2023
- The 8 Best Smart Notebooks of 2023
- The 8 Best Digital Picture Frames of 2023
- The Best Online Framing Services
- The 16 Best Places to Buy Holiday Cards Online of 2022
- The 32 Best Family Gifts of 2023
- What to Do With All Those Holiday Photos
- The 30 Best Personalized Gifts of 2023
- The 19 Best Sympathy Gifts of 2023
- The 8 Best Chore Charts of 2023
- The 30 Best Hanukkah Gifts of 2023
- The 16 Best Journals for Self Discovery in 2023
- The Best Nationwide Flower Delivery Services
- The 16 Best Coffee Table Books of 2023
By clicking “Accept All Cookies”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts.
Best photo book service online 2022
Create a picture perfect memento or gift with ease
Whether you're looking for the perfect gift for a loved one or a way to physically collect up all of your best snaps, a photo book is an affordable, easy-to-make product.
Photo books are made online. You upload your favorite photos, pick a theme and away you go! Within minutes, you can have a photo book ready to finalize and order. Or, if you want to, you can take some extra time to craft something really special.
As most of us take and store our photos on our smartphones, the best photo book services listed below let you upload photos straight from your phone, social media sites or computer.
Whether you’re looking to keep all your favorite recipes in one place, capture the fondest memories of your travel adventures or gift a precious wedding album, keep reading to find out the best photo books online in 2022.
Today's top 3 best photo book services:
1. Mixbook is our favorite photo book service (opens in new tab) Mixbook truly ticks all the best photo book boxes. It's a dream to use, with loads of customizable options if you want to create something truly special. And the quality you get back is excellent, without having to spend a small fortune.
Use promo code CHEERS23B to get up to 50% off
2. Artifact Uprising - the choice for luxury (opens in new tab) Artifact Uprising may come up a little more expensive than others on this list, but the quality is second to none. It's a fabulous choice if you're after an extra special product to keep or give to a loved one, with extra special options like foil-embossed writing and walnut presentation boxes!
3. Snapfish - friendly service with plenty of discounts (opens in new tab) It seems that whenever you go to the Snapfish website, there's a discount available of some nature. That's great news, especially considering that it's also a really slick service with myriad size and design options to let you create your prefect present or memento.
Best photo book sites in 2022
Why you can trust TechRadar Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test .
Specifications
Reasons to buy, reasons to avoid.
Mixbook (opens in new tab) is our top pick of all the photo book services on the market. Not only are the products great quality but the creating process is a fun experience, too. The Mixbook software is easy to use and gives you full creative freedom to make a photo book personalized to you.
There are 500+ themes to get those creative juices flowing. Whether it’s romance or seasonal, family or everyday, travel or kids, Mixbook has got you covered. And of course, you can customize each theme as much or as little as you like or start from scratch with a blank book.
The freedom doesn’t stop there - there are plenty of size, paper and cover options to pick from as well. You can pick the options that fit your budget and your vision. For a more luxe feel there’s a faux leather cover option with a dust jacket or go for the classic glossy hardcover for something more simple.
The Mixbook software is simple to use but there is a walkthrough on the website just in case. You can add text, stickers and change the background on the website or app, as well as resize, rearrange and edit the photos to make your photo book one of a kind.
All the options might seem a bit daunting and can take a bit of time to look through to find the best template for you, however, the end product is full of high quality prints that make a sentimental gift for friends and family.
Mixbook offers a 100% happiness guarantee and has a live chat feature if you need any help. There's always an offer to be had at the Mixbook website (opens in new tab) , so make sure you check the website for any discount codes before checking out to save some money.
2. Artifact Uprising
If you’re looking for an extra special memento or gift and are more concerned about quality than cost, we’d recommend taking a look at the Artifact Uprising website (opens in new tab) and browse the luxurious products it has to offer.
The site screams out ‘prestige’ from the moment you land on it and there’s no doubt it's going the extra mile to create something beyond the ordinary. When you take a look at the photo books menu, ‘Signature Latflat Photo Album’ is front and center. This is no cheap and cheerful product, but it will be a keepsake that you’ll want to cherish for years. And if you want to add one last special touch, you can add a walnut storage box as well.
Artifact Uprising does have more affordable products too but its offering of luxurious products is what sets it apart from the rest. The Everyday photo book has premium fabric binding, thick pages, and custom foil stamping on the cover and spine - and that's one of the more basic books! You’ll find a huge range of templates to get you started, with excellent options for weddings, baby pictures and other milestone events too.
This option of photo book service isn’t as customizable as some but the software will still let you start and finish a photo book in one session. All elements of the stylish designs are fixed but if you’re looking for a classic and minimalist aesthetic that has a premium look to it, Artifact Uprising is a great option.
This company is committed to a responsible production process, using recycled materials and powering production with renewable energy. It also uses the press printing method rather than the more traditional one, which is harmful to the environment. So not only will you have a beautifully finished photo book, but you’ll be doing good for the environment too.
To see the super smart options available at the service's website (opens in new tab) .
3. Snapfish
Snapfish (opens in new tab) is next on our list of the best photo book providers. You can be as hands on or hands off as you like with the huge variety of designs, backgrounds, embellishments and borders to choose from. Design yourself a totally unique photo book or stick to one of the templates for a quicker process.
The over 200 pre-designed templates make it easy to make your own photo book, and once you’ve sifted through all the options to find the one for you, it’s a quick process too. It can be slightly difficult to search through the content but if you don’t have the time for that, just use one of the templates suggested in the ‘What’s Hot’ section.
The image quality as a whole is good but some cover photos have been reported as saturated. This is something found to be quite common amongst photo book providers so make sure you pick your photo carefully to avoid looking too orange!
Snapfish tries to keep its carbon footprint down by printing all its photo books in the US. But we couldn't find anything more on sustainable practices in the company.
You can usually bag a good deal on Snapfish, so take a look at its dedicated deals page (opens in new tab) before checking out.
4. Shutterfly
Shutterfly (opens in new tab) is another option for anyone looking to take a more hands off approach whilst creating a photo book. Theme and background variations are plentiful so you can still personalize the end product even if you let the Shutterfly software do most of the work for you.
The wide selection of templates is sure to have what you’re looking for and if you choose the ‘Make It Manually’ option, you can customize every aspect of the photo book. The Shutterfly software lets you move and resize images and change font type and color, as well as much more.
If you don’t have the time to adjust every detail or simply aren’t feeling that creative, Shutterfly offers a ‘Make It Fast’ option, which gets a designer to do it for you. This option will do all the groundwork, making the photo book in three business days for an extra simple and speedy process.
Whichever option you choose, you can add up to 1,000 photos and have up to 30 images on a page. The photos are generally of high quality but the odd print has been reported to be a bit off in terms of balance.
Shutterfly works with suppliers to reuse and recycle unique press waste used in printing, such as oil filters, ink canisters, and press components. It says that it donates excess materials to local non-profits where possible too.
In fifth place we’ve got Picaboo (opens in new tab) , which offers some great easy-to-use software with content that facilitates those creative needs. The ability to search through backgrounds and clipart is really useful - especially when there are so many options to choose from. However, the print quality isn’t as good as those photo book providers listed above, but it's still better than lots of others out there.
Picaboo has its fair share of themes to look through, including wedding, travel and baby. But if you make the wrong selection and aren’t happy with your photo book, the company offers a 100% satisfaction guarantee. You just need to contact Picaboo within 30 days and you’ll be eligible for a refund. For more on this, check out Picaboo’s Satisfaction Guarantee (opens in new tab) .
The website is straightforward and easy to use, making it a great option if you want to start and finish your book as quickly as possible. That doesn’t mean the end product is compromised though. The project software allows full creativity, with nothing in the templates being fixed, so you can make the photo book exactly how you want it.
There's a dedicated special offers page (opens in new tab) on the Picaboo site that could save you money before checking out.
6. Amazon Prints
You buy everything else from the retail giant, so why not your photo book as well? Well, Amazon Prints (opens in new tab) is a cheaper option when it comes to creating a personalized book but it doesn’t offer as many choices as some of our other top picks for the best photo book service.
If you are in a hurry, there are some pre-designed books to choose from and an autofill feature to make the process simple. However, if you do want to take a bit more time, the templates are fully customizable - adding, rotating, resizing and moving photos or changing backgrounds and adding clip art will make the photo book personal to you. But it has been reported that the interface can be a little tricky to get your head around at first.
Again the quality isn’t the best of the bunch, but for the price it isn’t a bad option. You can also make the most of the margin guidelines to make sure your photos don’t get obscured in the place you have put them. So if you’re not looking for anything fancy and don’t need loads of options, Amazon Prints could be worth a look.
Amazon is a retail giant so it's taking steps towards sustainability, aiming for net-zero carbon by 2040. However, we couldn’t find anything specific to the photo book process. To check out what it offers, head to - you guessed it - the photo prints section of Amazon.com (opens in new tab) .
Photo book FAQ
What is the best photo book of 2022.
Combining an interface that's really easy to use, pricing that won't break the bank and quality that won't disappoint, Mixbook is the best photo book provider of them all (opens in new tab) right now. It has hundreds of themes to choose from, with specialized designs for wedding snaps, holiday memories, baby keepsakes and more. You can customize them all as much or as little as you wish, to create the perfect photo book to keep or give to a loved one.
Who has the best quality photo books?
If your main priority is sheer quality - getting a photo book that really impresses but might cost a little more - then we'd heartily suggest that you take a look at Artifact Uprising's collection (opens in new tab) . The finish you get is a notch above what most of its competitors can offer, with special touches like foil embossments and walnut presentation boxes on offer, too. And the template designs themselves are genuinely handsome, too.
What is the best size for a photo book?
Sorry, we're going to completely sit on the fence on this one and say... it depends! If it's just cheap photo gifts that you have in mind, then keep the costs down by going for not much bigger than 8 x 8 inch. That's more than enough space to create an enduring keepsake.
But if you're after something more special, then crank things up. Taking things up to A4 or even A3 size means that you'll get larger (or more) photos to cherish and can turn your photo book into a stunning talking point to put on your coffee table.
Is Snapfish or Shutterfly better?
These are probably the two most well-known photo book providers in the US, and both offer a good product and plenty of customization options. There isn't much too choose between them - even their pricing is similar - but in a direct head-to-head, Snapfish has it by a nose (opens in new tab) . The quality of the finished product is more consistently better, in our view, and it's an absolute doddle to use.
Can I make a photo book on my phone?
We expect the majority of your photos are taken and stored on your phone - who can blame you, there’s some pretty good camera phones out there these days - so it only makes sense to make your photo book on your phone. The majority of companies have a smartphone app so you can do just that, including our favorite Mixbook (opens in new tab) .
Mixbook’s app allows you to access and edit any saved projects, upload photos directly from your phone and create a photo book from the palm of your hand. Not only does this mean you won’t have to transfer all your photos to your desktop, which can be a bit of a pain, but you can create a fully customized photo book from the palm of your hand.
Of course, there are some advantages to creating your photo book on your laptop instead of your phone. Some people might find the smaller screen of a smartphone harder to work on when rearranging photos or editing your images. If you prefer to work on a bigger screen so you can see more detail, you can always opt for the companies' website instead.
Photo book hints and tips
If you've never made your own photo book album before then it can look like a daunting task. The best photo book sites give you myriad options and features to tailor-make your ideal book and that can be overwhelming at first. But it doesn't have to be...here are some things to keep in mind if you need a bit of direction:
Keep it simple: You could spend hours and hours creating your perfect photo book, with the trimming and bordering of every page and photo custom designed and a different font for every occasion. Could . If you're new to photo book creation, we'd suggest starting with one of the hundreds of themes that each service provides. That way, you still get a beautiful book, but need only think about what photos you want where without having to get hung up on every last detail. Themes usually range through every event you can think of: Christmas, birthdays, holidays, anniversaries, graduations, Bar Mitzvas... the list goes on!
Size matters: As with anything; the more you pay, the more expensive it becomes. And the price really can escalate, especially as your pages mount up. If you just want a keepsake of an event or holiday and are after something tangible rather than scrolling through your photos, then keeping it small can also keep the costs down. But if it's a special holiday you're commemorating, or perhaps a wedding or christening - a book that will live out on your coffee table - you may wish to crank up the size as a photo book can be a very special object to keep forever.
Matte, glossy or lustre: The finish of the pages are purely personal preference, but it can be tricky to decide. Glossy is usually the most affordable option and is most like a traditional photo album of old, so you can't really go wrong - it also makes your colorful snaps look even more vibrant. But going for Matte lends a certain air of luxury to the product and some services will make these pages thicker, too (which is reflected in the cost). If you need to hedge your bets, a few photo book sites will give an option somewhere in between called something like Lustre or Semi-Gloss.
Pimp your photo book: If you're a bit of a photo book pro (or have the time to be a bit more daring), then the likes of Mixbook and Snapfish have some frankly awesome customisation options. Every single detail is at your disposal, from the positions of the snaps, background detailing, front and back cover design and personalised text to accompany each and every photo.
Be careful of timings: In the age of Amazon Prime (opens in new tab) , we've got all too used to ordering something one day and it arriving the next. Not so with photo books. OK, so you can pay extra for expedited delivery, but generally you're looking at at least a week before your handsome photo book drops on to your door mat. So we seriously advise planning ahead, especially around peak times like Thanksgiving and Christmas.
How long does it take to deliver a photo book?
In a world where we’ve become accustomed to next day delivery, or even same day in some cases, a seven working day wait might seem like a lifetime. However, these photo books are highly customizable, with each one being personal to you so they do take a little longer to be delivered - and by that we mean a few days, which really isn’t long at all!
Most services have a delivery time of around a week but you can expect a longer wait for some of the larger and more luxe photo books. Mixbook, for example, delivery ranges from 14 working days for the budget option to five days for express delivery but its standard is 10 working days. You can enter the size, paper and cover type you’re looking for and an estimated delivery date will be given to you on the Mixbook website.
What is the best photo book for a wedding album?
A photo book is a great way to treasure those wedding memories but with so many options, which company is the best to go for when documenting your special day?
As it’s your wedding you might be looking to splash out on something more premium. In that case, Artifact Uprising offers a hardcover wedding photo book or a wedding layflat photo album. The latter of which has a custom foil stamping on the cover, which gives an extra luxurious feel. However, these photo books aren't as customizable as some of the other options but they are a more prestigious offering.
For something at a more affordable price, Mixbook has over 60 Wedding book templates for you to choose from or you can start from scratch with a blank canvas book. Although these photo books come at a more affordable price, they’re still great quality and super customizable too.
- Individualize your greetings with the best photo cards
- These are the best cameras you can buy right now
- Bring in the year in style with a home designed photo calendar
TechRadar Newsletter
Sign up to receive daily breaking news, reviews, opinion, analysis, deals and more from the world of tech.
Luke is a freelance writer and editor with over two decades of experience covering tech, science and health. Among many others he writes across Future titles covering health tech, software and apps, VPNs, TV, audio, smart home, antivirus, broadband, smartphones, cars and plenty more. He also likes to climb mountains, swim outside and contort his body into silly positions while breathing as calmly as possible.
Other versions of this page are available with specific content for the following regions:
Review of Creating a Motif Photo Book (downloaded for an Apple Mac)*
As a photographer and creative, I have been using Apple Mac’s for around 15 years. For most of that time, Apple Mac computers have had an integrated system for making photo books, printing pictures and creating albums. These could all be accessed at the click of a button, however, around two years ago, they got rid of all the great feature from their system, which has meant that apart from having my iPhotos on my Mac, I haven’t created and printed any books since that time! Motif is here to change all that, and is a Photo Project Software that has been around for a little while, but has recently made many improvements to its operating system. The program allows you to create numerous styles of books, Calendars, Cards, Prints, and even Wall Decor and is all compatible with Mac.
Photo books create such treasured memories, and although there are so many photo project software out there, it’s hard to know which ones may suit you and your computer. We have always loved making them, whether it be as gifts or simply to be able to look back on one of our most favourite holidays. Funnily enough, the last book we made, was of our unbelievable trip to Disney in 2017, where we had such a magical time, that we just wanted to be able to look back on it again and again. You may ask why it is so important to have it in book form rather than being happy with scrolling through the computer, but in a book, there is something so much more tangible about it, and it means that you can share the experience with your family and friends rather than alone at your laptop!
So since the death of Mac’s integrated photo project software, there have been several companies out there, most of which aren’t always compatible with a Mac computer. So when we were asked to review Motif Photo Project Software, I was excited when I was told that it was Mac compatible. To get started, I firstly had to download the program onto my Mac. I did this by using the links they provided, Motif for iOS here and for Mac here – it was surprisingly straightforward. I simply went to the App store, where it was free to download. It took minutes for it to all appear on my computer. What was also handy is it automatically placed itself on my applications bar at the bottom of my screen, so can be accessed with the simple click of the icon.
Once downloaded you click on the icon and then go to get started, and it automatically goes to Photos (which is a feature on Mac computers that stores all your photos and automatically updates from all your Mac devises including my phone), where it has a drop-down and creates a folder called Projects. Within this folder, you can then add your chosen images by selecting and dragging them into it. I selected all my images, which ended up being more than 400 images. This is where I had a bit of a problem. It took more 20 minutes for the images to download. In comparison, when using the integral Mac program it would take maybe 2-3 minutes.
Once the images finally downloaded, this is where Motif really started to shine. So don’t be put off if you find the same issue, and I would suggest, letting it download whilst you go off and do something else for a bit. As once they are on there the program is so easy to use. I actually made this project with my 10-year-old daughter, who just loves looking at photographs. We decided to make an album for my husband, celebrating 10 years of our lives together with our children (hence why I had so many pictures!). We could drag and drop the images into the pages. If the images were in the wrong place you could simply drag it back down into your image section at the bottom of the screen, and then choose another.
It has so many great features including, being able to change the number of photos that feature on each page, from one to nine. You can also add pages to your project too, we, however, stuck with the number of pages that are within the £19.99 book, which is the one we were asked to review. The more pages you add the more the cost increases. This actually made it more of a challenge and more fun as we still wanted to cover a 10 year time period of photos, so this meant we made much more adjustments to the pages. So we added more photos to one page. Other interesting features include being able to change the already formatted images spaces. So if your photo didn’t quite fit in the box provided, you could change the size of the photo by zooming in or out, but you could also easily drag the size of the box. Magically when we did this, it self adjusted the other boxes so that they still all fitted well on the page, meaning that you had some large images and some small within the same page.
All in all this photobook was so easy to piece together, and you really can personalise them to suit you and your style. We love bright colour and patterns so choose the one that suited us best, but even within that, you could still make colour changes and pattern changes within each page, to add a bit of variety to your book too! The books come in a variety of shapes and a couple of different sizes, however, all theses will make variations on cost. But with the book we were reviewing we were able to fit a large majority (not 400 but at last 300) of our chosen images into the book, which meant we had such a full book of the really special moments of when our children changed our lives forever.
The book arrived within around four days of ordering, which is great and it was delivered straight to my door. It wasn’t posted through, however, I would expect smaller items fit quite well through the letterbox and they are well packaged so won’t sink being damaged. The book is well presented in a card folder and has a protective cover around it too. The images are nice however, they are a little flat, and I know from prints that I have of the same images that this isn’t the photo that is the problem but the print of the book. This being said, my husband absolutely loves the book, he too noticed the dullness of some of the images, but this didn’t put him off how happy he was to see all our faces firmly fixed in this well-presented book. He hasn’t stopped looking at it and really can’t be happier. So it really is a win in our household so much so that my daughter is already planning our next photo book project!
Motif download is free – but you pay for the books once you place your order, where you will be asked for your preferred method of payment. The Book prices vary deepening on which photo project you use, but the Motif book we reviewed cost £19.99 plus delivery. Calendars start at £15.99 Cards start at 79p All are plus delivery charges which are different again depending on the product you order.
Who can use Motif?
You can download Motif to Mac products, including your iPad and your iPhone, as well as your computer or laptop. You can also download Motif onto Microsoft computers, and your Android phone too.
How to use Motif?
Where can we find Motif? You can get Motif for iOS here and for Mac here
Review by: Lex Ward
You may also want to read this:
Polar Bears: A Life Under Threat by Michel Rawicki
Anna of the Five Town’s Photography Exhibition
Photo Advent Calendar with Kinder Chocolate Review
*Disclaimer: We were sent the printed album for the feature. All opinions are our own
yeahlifestyle
Lifestyle blog featuring reviews on travel destinations, food, family activities, gadgets and events in Cheshire, Staffordshire & Manchester.
Street Scene heads to The Lowry Theatre in Salford Quays
Review : songmics prince castle play tent for toddlers*, you may also like, review: foreo bear and serum serum serum collection*, mother’s day gift guide ideas*, review: canal toys style 4 ever design studio*, valentine’s and galentine’s day gift inspiration for your..., valentine’s gift review: xander kostroma® crystal jewellery*, giveaway : top trumps lex match : the..., 21 comments.
The photo book looks so pretty and it’s such a wonderful way to store your memories in a physical way. I remember I made a photo book like this for my mom’s wedding, but that was years ago when this type of software didn’t exist. It took me ages to put it all together.
This software is so much easier to use and there is such joy seeing online photos in printed form
Your photo book looks great! I also have a photo book from Motif and we love it – such a wonderful way to store some memories.
Absolutely great way to store photos Rebecca
It’s good to know that these photo books are so easy to put together; I think they would make for a great Mother’s Day gift.
Yes they would indeed, great for grandparents!
What a gorgeous photo book! I seriously take so many images but just save them on my computer and dip into them when needed, I really do need to start printing these out and displaying them! 🙂 What better way than in a gorgeous photo book! 🙂 Sim x
We do the same, so having the chance to print them out using Motif Photo has been awesome for us
We have looked at doing a photoboox, they look great and I think something a lot nicer than a photo album, my husband is a firm believe photos should be printed and not stored on phones or computers
Absolutely agree with your husband, the photo just comes to life when it is in printed form
This is great, I don’t think the Card price is that bad, and actually could be quite effective, the Calender is such a great idea with the possibility of some stunning family photos, though i would probably like the Photobook option the most for keepsake
The photobook was our idea as well as we wanted something we could show our family and friends when they came over
I love a good photo book! I buy my husband one every year at Christmas with the previous years photos in. I think they are so much nicer to hold in your hand the memories. This one looks fabulous
Yes they are as we forget to print images now with everything being online
We’ve got a trip to Disney coming up too! So will definitely look into this as we’d like to make a photobook up!
Oh you so need to make a photobook of your trip for sure
I always find it so time consuming to create photo books. This seems more straightforward and easy to use.
It is so easy to just pick the images and place them in the pre-formated set-up
I love photo books!! Although I havent made one in a couple of years! This looks really simple to use!
It sure is and worth checking out if you use apple products
I love photo books and have a couple now, I just have to remember where I keep them because I keep losing them haha!
Leave a Comment Cancel Reply
By using this form you agree with the storage and handling of your data by this website. *
- Cookbook Reviews
- Food & Ingredient Reviews
- Restaurant Reviews
- Beauty Products
- Gadget Reviews
- Kitchen & Home Products
- Lifestyle Products
- Art & Theatre
- Home, Interior & Outdoor
- Book Reviews
- Upcoming Events
- Blogger Events
- Family Days Out
- Travel & Destinations
- Competitions
- Disclosure / Policies
- About our bloggers
- Brands we have worked with
By continuing to use the site, you agree to the use of cookies. More Information Accept
The cookie settings on this website are set to "allow cookies" to give you the best browsing experience possible. If you continue to use this website without changing your cookie settings or you click "Accept" below then you are consenting to this.
Photo Books
Photo Calendars
Photo Cards
- About our App
- Refer a Friend
- About Motif
- 🌐 United States - English
Travel Photo Books
You’ve dusted off the suitcases. Updated your translation app. Airline reservations are made. The gas tank is full and oil is changed. You’re ready to travel again and photograph everyone and everything along the way. Chronicle those moments in a printed travel photo album. Welcome friends and family over to page through your holiday photo album. Make endless scrolling for pictures a thing of the past. A personalized holiday photo album or custom travel photo book is a thoughtful gift idea that speaks from the heart. Capture your travels in print with Motif.
Personalized travel photo albums
Make your own travel photo book to capture every detail of your holiday travel and vacations . Create a permanent and stylish record of the places you’ve been. Imagine a bookshelf filled with holiday photo books and personalized travel photo books. The name of that person, that little town, and that specific date is now part of your travel library. Just pick it up and relive that special memory anytime.
How do you make your own travel photo book?
Make your own travel photo album easily by first downloading Motif to your Mac desktop/laptop and iPhone/iPad. It’s a powerful travel memory photo book maker that transforms your photos into beautiful photo books. Simply click/tap the Motif icon, select the album or memory, then choose the size and style of book. Motif scans for your best photos and roots out duplicates. Add your own text to create a custom holiday photo book or travel memory photo album.
Find Inspiration in the Blog
Road Trip Photos Ideas to Take on Your Next Adventure
How to Use the iPhone’s Ultra-Wide Camera
Underwater Photography Guide: How to Make a Splash With Your Photos
Travel Photo Book Sizes
Extra-large Hardcover 13 x 10 inches 33 x 25 cm Maximize your best moments with our largest, most luxurious format. Starting at $54 99 With dust jacket and photo-wrap cover
Large Hardcover 11 x 8.5 inches 28 x 22 cm Celebrate cherished moments in this coffee table centerpiece. Starting at $34 99 With dust jacket and photo-wrap cover
Extra-large Square Hardcover 10 x 10 inches 25 x 25 cm Modern and chic, our square format compliments your photo book collection. Starting at $44 99 With dust jacket and photo-wrap cover
Square Hardcover 8 x 8 inches 20 x 20 cm Modern and chic, yet slightly smaller square format for your photo book collection. Starting at $29 99 With dust jacket and photo-wrap cover
Square Softcover 8 x 8 inches 20 x 20 cm Square and chic, flip-friendly, fits your memories just about anywhere. Starting at $19 99
Medium Softcover 8 x 6 inches 20 x 15 cm Our most compact and flexible format perfect for any photo book story. Starting at $13 99
Create a custom holiday photo album
With nearly all our photos stored on devices, travel photo book ideas are easy with Motif. Create a holiday photo album your family will have for generations. Chronicle your travels and your holidays in photo books with Motif.
Explore Photo Books
The perfect gift for any special occasion.
Wedding Photo Books
Baby Photo Books
Holiday Photo Cards
Portfolio Photo Book
Want some free stuff?
Share your email and we’ll share all we know about photo projects, photography, and probably more
Keep in touch with Motif
Keep in touch
IMAGES
VIDEO
COMMENTS
Absolutely appalled by Motif customer service or lack there of. I received my 2 very expensive memory photo books on Monday. They were both damaged in transit and completely covered in soil within the boxes, making them unusable. It was extremely upsetting seeing the books in this way.
Our Motif photo book was the only one of our test hardbound books that included a dust jacket. While the jacket was nice, we would have preferred it if Motif had put the money into...
Motif is an awesome alternative to the discontinued Apple Photo Books! It is pretty easy to pick up and has enough options while still being simple and classic. - Lauren H was worried the calendars wouldn't be as good as the ones I ordered from Apple, but they are exactly the same (down to the packaging) if not better!
The Motif team resolved the issues promptly and I am very satisfied with the end result. I received a new photo book to replace the photo book that arrived below their quality standards. Thank you very much, Motif! I will be ordering more photo books in the near future! A++. Date of experience: November 14, 2022
Book spreads lose a lot of the photo in the crease Mixbook's overall quality is below Printique's, but rougly matched with the other competitors. Its cover tied Printique's for quality and was...
Photo book quality is just ok, not great I tried Motif because it integrated with my Apple Photo app. The experience of making a photo book was good enough, but the end product didn't wow me. It was just ok. Not something I could give as a gift and feel good. The color and print quality was mediocre. Date of experience:September 20, 2022
Mixbook makes creating photo albums fun by gathering images from your computer, social media profiles, online photo-storage accounts, and even your smartphone. In our testing, it offered the...
Apple outsourced its photo prints from several companies and Motif was one of them; who now offer identical books to what Apple used to be for those who want to carry on creating the Apple style books or for anyone looking for a nice photo book. Motif offers the exact same product, the same sizes, same price, same cover, same binding and same ...
The materials and printing are great considering the price paid, and these photo books make great additions to my other photo albums. I would recommend giving Motif a look if you want an affordable and easy-to-use app for preserving your best photos in a photo book.
Review: Print iPhone Photos Using Motif. Andrew Orr. 2 minute read Oct 28th, 2019 1:31 PM EDT ... Motif Photo Book. First, Motif is available in the App Store as well as the Mac App Store. On the ...
How much it costs: A hardcover 9-by-9-inch photo book costs $30 for 20 pages and 99 cents for each additional page. A softcover 7-by-7-inch photo book costs $15 for 20 pages and 49 cents for each ...
Motif uses the same printing plants and presses used for previous Apple Photos products. Your photo books, calendars, and cards will make a beautiful first impression. They'll stand the test of time as our papers provide true whiteness, bright colors, and no image bleed on the reverse side. Motif uses only the finest papers and richest inks.
I slightly preferred the spine on the Motif book, which felt a little more flexible, so it was easier to open to a spread and not have to press down hard to get the pages to lay flat. I was also disappointed with the paper cover of the Mimeo book, which I ordered with a black background.
Photo books from Motif start at $18, and there are four hardcover sizes or three softcover sizes to choose from. They're printed on premium paper with a silk-finish, and the exterior features an anti-scratch, anti-scuff lamination to improve durability. Plus, each book comes with a dust jacket and photo-wrap cover.
Motif's smart technology auto-selects your best pictures seamlessly to create stunning photo books, canvas wall art, and calendars that last a lifetime. Capture the moments that matter to you simply and beautifully with luxurious products built to last. Our exceptional print quality ensures that your photo books are something to share and treasure.
Best photo book service online 2022 By Luke Edwards published 7 January 2022 Create a picture perfect memento or gift with ease Included in this guide: 1 Mixbook Photo Book Check Price 2...
Motif download is free - but you pay for the books once you place your order, where you will be asked for your preferred method of payment. The Book prices vary deepening on which photo project you use, but the Motif book we reviewed cost £19.99 plus delivery. Calendars start at £15.99. Cards start at 79p. All are plus delivery charges ...
Motif [New Apple] Photo Book - Review + 40% OFF - YouTube Blog: http://thephotobookguru.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/thephotobookguruHere is another perfect substitute for the...
Make your own travel photo album easily by first downloading Motif to your Mac desktop/laptop and iPhone/iPad. It's a powerful travel memory photo book maker that transforms your photos into beautiful photo books. Simply click/tap the Motif icon, select the album or memory, then choose the size and style of book.