I am being pressed to put photographs of family, travel etc. into photobooks. This is something I haven’t done before. I have found a few places that do them (including my favourite print supplier, Loxley), but I wondered which (UK) sites others use.
it partly depends on quantity, if it’s one or two then you might as well use any of the photo labs, more of the same book you might as well use an online printer liike solopress or someone, the quality probably won’t be as good but they will be much cheaper
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I have used blurb.com and walmart.com for photo magazines and books, respectively. Blurb was far easier to layout on, and I really liked the quality of the premium magazine print. Shipping to UK will run you about 20£ for a dozen copies. Walmarts books were fine and enjoyed by everyone who recieved them, however cookie-cutter it seemed to myself.
hi @epeeist
I made a template in LaTeX to directly export images from darktable and create photobooks in A4 or A5 format.
It will generate a pdf.
You can print them from any print shop. The one I’m using - ooblik - is in France but I think any printer shop will do the job.
Disclaimer: I know that LaTeX is a bit hard to deal with, but with a template it’s super fast to automatically build a book. It usually takes me more time to select and edit images than build a book.
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Like a number of people here, I am a Linux user. The problem with Blurb and some other vendors is that you have to create your book through their application, only available for Windows and possible macOS.
What I really need is to be able to use an online design tool.
I generate pdf files from \LaTeX and upload them direct to Blurb on any platform.
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Yes, I hadn’t even thought about this until I saw the post by @boredphoto
I will have a look at the examples of books on Blurb to see what the format looks like.
Do you or @boredphoto do anything in particular when it comes to colour profile, resolution etc. when you embed the images in the PDF file?
For color I stick with 450-600 dpi jpegs, for technical images they are 800-1200 dpi halftones. For color I just output to sRGB using a calibrated monitor and let the printer automagically obtain perfectly acceptable results, and have never bothered to go beyond that.
LaTeX I can use, but being a KDE user I wondered whether about alternatives to generate PDFs.
The obvious one is Scribus, for which there are photobook templates and tools
I’m using Kile, it’s great for it. If you are going to use my template ideally:
- export the images in the order you want to print
- you can use the darktable function to generate the main file
- cut and paste in the chapters or in a unique file if you want to not have chapters
I made this script to generate the main latex code starting from a folder of images:
#!/bin/zsh
if [ "$#" -ne 1 ]; then
echo "Usage: $0 <path_to_folder>"
exit 1
fi
# Main folder as parameter
images_folder="$1"
for image_file in ${images_folder}/*.jpg; do
echo "\\\\begin{figure}[H]"
echo " \\\\includegraphics[width=\\\\textwidth]{$image_file}"
echo " \\\\caption{}"
echo "\\\\end{figure}"
echo "\\\\clearpage\n"
done
save it as build.sh and then run something like
./build.sh chapter-01 > chapter-01.tex
to build the tex file from images of chapter-01.
I usually keep the final build in the build folder:
Keeping it like a source project allows me to recreate all my photobooks even in the next 20y assuming that LaTeX will be still available 
I think it’s a future proof solution.
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In Europe at least, there’s Cewe, which is often available as supermarket kiosks, or as the service backing the photo services of various supermarket etc. chains (Drogerie Markt, Rossmann, Migros). Their software is available on Linux, too.
Canva also supports photo books. We’ve only tried creating a flyer as a PDF, that worked well enough. I have no experience with their print partners. https://www.canva.com/photo-books/
I’ve used PrestoPhoto, they are in the US and Canada. I created the layout in Scribus and sent them the pdf. They have a decent pdf preflight tool (web based) that gives you a good preview of your layout. Print quality was pretty good. Had one issue with fulfillment on a single order that was corrected quickly.
I’m a bit old school, and prefer working in page layout to the online creation tools most companies offer.
I don’t know whether Europe includes the UK any more, but Cewe is available here.
I was pleasantly surprised when I attempted to download their software that it recognised that I was running Linux, and that they had a Linux version of their designer. I was expecting to have to run in it inside bottles.
If you wanted to be really picky, you might have a moan at the fact that it only runs under X11, and not Wayland, but gift horses and mouths come to mind.