Following many threads on social media and wedding forum sites, I repeatedly attended across the question of where to go with your photos in order to make your own wedding scrapbook. One common advice is to head to blurb, Shutterfly or other photo book makers. Also, it is often noted that many wedding scrapbook makers, like Queensberry, do only business with photographers. But in the event you really get a photo book for your wedding photo album? This article is trying to highlight the pros and contras of photo books compared to proper wedding photo albums.
Pros
There are various reasons in favor of photo books. To begin with, they are easily available. You can chose between a multitude of different providers, they come cheap with prices starting from 10 Dollars plus they are delivered very quickly with e.g. blurb delivering most books within 7 to 10 business days after ordering. Proper wedding photo albums alternatively are much harder to really get your hands on. It really is true that the majority of firms do only business with photographers and other wholesale customers. Prices are considerably higher and delivery times change from 2 weeks to six months.
Also, in order to make your personal design, photo book companies often provide a design software, that allows you to put together a straightforward album layout within a few minutes. Often the software comes with an integration into the ordering process, so after designing it is a piece of cake to upload your photos and submit your order. Wedding album makes usually don’t provide this feature for two reasons: usually the companies are too small to build up their own software and generally those programs are not sufficient to generate the sophisticated layout design required for a real wedding photo album.
https://www.d-tt.nl/apps/designer
Contras
While all the points mentioned so far tend to be more or less in favor of getting a photo book, there are also some very good reasons against it. As said earlier, wedding photo albums are more expensive, but their still are value for money, in the event that you consider what you obtain. You get an effective heavy cover made of real or faux leather, that includes a substantially better feel to it than the hard or soft-paper cover of an image book.
The photos in your wedding album are developed with a chemical process. Their resolution is perfect and their colors never fade. This may be true for a few high-quality photo books, however the majority of them uses laser-jet printing resulting in a notably lower photo quality. The pages in a proper wedding photo album are constructed of solid paper or carton (true limited to flush-mount albums). Again, this results in a much nicer feeling when flipping through the album, than the floppy thin pages of an image book.
And finally concerning the design, if you actually want to design your personal wedding photo album, it is not at all a negative idea to use a professional software for it like DG Foto Art, Photoshop or Gimp. This involves some practice and skill, but only pro software gives you the sophisticated fading, transparency, shadow and photo touch-up effects you will have to make a state-of-the-art album layout. The easy self-design software of the wedding photo album makers gets you merely half the way.
Conclusion
A wedding photo album is one of the most important safekeepers of the memories of your wedding day and you may look at it over and over, possibly for the rest of you live. Therefore, all of the money you invest in it is invested very well. Therefore, I’d advice you to go for a wedding photo book, only if you don’t care too much about all of this “big day fuzz” or, if your allowance simply does not allow for more. Otherwise, get yourself a proper wedding album, because on the long term it is worth it!