The Best Photo Book Service

To discover 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 for 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 could also consider 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 think about 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 don’t let you at least arrange and reorder photos (like Chatbooks). And, on the flipside, we dismissed any that looked too technical or complex for people with no design experience.

Many photo-printing services offer frequent, deep discounts and promotions throughout the year, so it can be difficult to make an accurate pricing comparison. Noting the existence of holiday sales, we can’t say for sure whether one service will be cheaper than another at any given time. That said, we prioritized services that offered basic, 20-page, approximately 8-by-11-inch books for under $50.

In general, these are the key features we considered:

• Customization options: The best photo-book services strike a fine balance between offering a creative, diverse range of editing options and overwhelming users with a dizzying 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 easy to grasp, even at an amateur level. Ideally, they should include all of the basics, such as a black-and-white filter, shadows, brightness, contrast, saturation, plus the ability to rotate, resize, and reorder images.
• 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 from 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 this sounds fancy, it’s 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.

To test these services, we made 20-page photo books using DSLR shots taken by professional photographers, as well as iPhone snaps taken during a trip to Italy and France. We 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. For each book, we also used the default cover and paper options (which are the cheapest or second-cheapest available).

Over the years and several rounds of testing, we’ve asked printing expert McAtee to compare and contrast print and page quality. We’ve asked friends who enjoy making family photo albums to examine the photo books, and they’ve 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. This 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).

Versatile image-uploading options make finding the photos you want easy. If most of your iPhone photos end up trapped inside your phone (like ours do), you’ll likely find that adding 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 for you 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.

Its book-building software is easier to use than any other. 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, too.

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 (to fix your horizon lines, you have to click and hold down the arrow in the circle).

Six filters can give your printed photos an Instagram feel; you can also play with shadows and borders or even make a heart-shaped image. Text was easy to insert, and Mixbook offers a plethora of font choices and controls.

Thoughtful little touches make a big difference. When you’re pulling from an available image library in Mixbook, to make a photo bigger, you simply have to hover over it. This is something we really liked, since it can be tough to choose your next image based on a tiny thumbnail. (When we used other services, we sometimes had to add the actual photo just to determine whether it was the one we’d meant to include in the first place.)

It offers fewer—but higher-quality—templates than the competition. Mixbook does not have as many layout options as some other services, but each well-designed template can be kept as is or modified. In a sea of other design decisions, these tightly curated 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.

Photo reproductions are vibrant and color-accurate. As in previous testing, our 20-page, 11-by-8½-inch Mixbook was one of the most vibrant among all of the books we created, and the colors most closely matched colors in our original photographs.

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. We reached out to Mixbook to ask about its color-correction practices. And CEO and co-founder Andrew Laffoon confirmed that Mixbook automatically applies “very minimal” auto correction, and that there isn’t a way to turn it off.

Mixbook uses high-quality paper. Of the four books we created in our most recent round of testing, Mixbook’s most basic album option came with the second-thickest pages—akin to the pages of a coffee-table book. The pages felt 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.

Its pricing is on a par with that of competitors. 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.

It won’t spam you with email ads. 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. We actually had to go into account settings to sign up for Mixbook’s email offers (and you can unsubscribe just as easily).

Flaws but not dealbreakers:

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, which did not appear to be damaged. Customer service was responsive, requesting images of the damage and then sending us a new copy for free. The new book arrived in just a few days, undamaged.

Considering its intuitive software and the overall quality of the finished product, Walmart Photo offers good value—even if its print quality doesn’t quite match up to Mixbook’s.

Adding photos is easy. With this service, it was just as easy to import images from a computer or from online photo-storage and sharing platforms as it was with our top pick. The only snag is that Walmart doesn’t offer direct uploading from your smartphone, as Mixbook does.

The easy-to-use software includes some nice touches. Walmart’s photo-editing tools are useful, including a tilt function that allowed us to fix imperfect horizon lines—a photographer’s pet peeve.

Construction and colors pale in comparison with those of pricier options. Unfortunately, both the photo expert we spoke to and the non-experts we polled found that all of the photos, including the cover image, looked muted and dull in the finished product. And 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.

But the value proposition is still solid. All of these caveats aside, though, the Walmart Photo albums offered the best value for the price (they were half the price of the others we tested). So if you’re making a lot of books for holiday gifts and you want to keep to a lower budget, or you’re making an album that’s more for fun than for archival purposes, Walmart Photo could be a great option.

Taylor McAtee, our printing expert, said 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 having 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. Picaboo offers more photo-editing tools than any other service we tested. But its image-upload speeds were slower, it didn’t offer a smartphone upload option, and some design choices (including a few stickers that looked like 1990s clip art) felt tacky and outdated. Picaboo’s book had slightly thicker pages than Mixbook’s, but Picaboo also had a thinner cover.

Snapfish delivered a book that was nearly identical to Walmart’s—even down to the packaging. That meant it had the same dull and muted photos, thin pages, and thin cover, but here’s the kicker, Snapfish was twice the price. Snapfish also sent us the most promotional emails following our order—an annoying pace of one every day.

Though Shutterfly was previously a top pick, its image quality was a letdown in the most recent layflat book we created. Some images did not match up across the seams, and the tendency toward magenta tones made our images appear warmer than the originals. Its software was also 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 the other services).

Google Photo Books is the path of least resistance for people who already use 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’s 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, as long as 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. BookWright, meanwhile, offers a huge range of design options, including layouts and fonts, with very little glitching. It 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. We think 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 its software, which requires you to upload photos one by one into the selected layout. After I made 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 to click on.

This article was edited by Ben Keough and Erica Ogg.