While looking through many advertisements in my graphic design magazine called Communication Arts, I found several advertisements for books you can make from your photos. I decided to try out the company with the most promising looking ad, which ended up being Mpix.com. I thought that if they could offer me a price that was reasonable and if the product was good enough, I would be able to make a book from all of our wedding photos (well not all of them, as there were 1600 to choose from).
The website was quite easy to understand from the get-go, which is the first requirement for someone like me who is constantly striving to make user-friendly websites. I could see what I needed to click on in order to get started, which made me feel like this relationship might just work out. Second, I found that the price was reasonable enough that I had to give it a try. 30 pages for $40 and extra pages were $0.25 each. So I took the next step and downloaded the software for free.
After opening the program for the first time, I felt like I had a pretty good idea for how the program worked. It didn't take me long to be creating new pages with backgrounds and multiple photos laid across the top. I could see myself spending hours and hours on this project. One thing I learned later in the game was that I should have moved all my photos to my hard drive, rather than taking them straight off of a CD, as the program only gathers temporary thumbnails of all the images you drag and drop in the interface. If you take the CD out of the drive, the thumbnails in the program disappear. Other than that, however, it was smooth sailing to complete my books.
The best part of the whole deal came at the end, however. Once I had a complete book, I took the plunge to upload the file to the Mpix website. They make it very easy with a "send to Mpix" button. I proofed the final PDF of the book and set my computer to upload. I left the office for a few hours to go for a run, and when I returned, I entered my credit card number into the website and added 4 books to my cart. Now I just had to wait....for 2 days! I uploaded the file Tuesday night. Friday at work, I was chugging along on my email as usual, and the mailman brought me a package from Mpix. WOW! Just like that, they had somehow printed my books and got them in the mail within 2 days. That's service.
I'm a firm believer in making these books now; they're so much better to me than bulky photo albums. Actually, I ended up making one for the Ceremony and anther for the Reception. They limited me to 50 pages, but it's kind of nice having 2 books. I'd much rather have several coffee table books like these than the multitude of spiral photo pocket albums I currently have from the past 30 years of my life. Give it a try yourself; I think you'll be impressed.
