Mypicalbum

With photo album creation websites, it’s easy today to have fun and create the album of your year, your vacations, your last family event or even your recipe book! Discover in this guide how to make a quality photo album, which are the best tools and services that often offer promotions.

We have tested for you 12 photo album creation services. Follow our advice to choose the best site to print your photo album, the one that matches your creativity, your quality requirements and your budget.

Please note that the prices indicated in our selection are for square format hardcover photo albums.

What are the best photo albums?

Easy to use and very customizable, the CEWE site offers a beautiful quality of printing and remains our favorite to this day. The site also allows you to make advent calendars (with chocolates!), wall decorations, smartphone covers (Apple, Samsung and Huawei), announcements and photo objects.

CEWE also offers a special Baby Photo Book menu that is very practical for busy parents who want to create their child’s first photo album. Priced at €24.95 for 22 pages on certified child-safe matte paper, it’s bound with a sturdy spiral for easy page turning at any age. Using the Baby background and clipart banks offered by the site, you can make a beautiful album in a few minutes, the hardest part will be sorting through the hundreds of photos of your child!

The latest version of the software to download to create albums is clearer, more fun and more fluid. It integrates many formats from the 14 x 13 cm mini-square to the large XXL panorama of 39 x 29 cm to sublimate your photos. You will also find a new exclusive album model in the style of the famous explorer photographer Yann Arthus Bertrand. A marvel to print your most beautiful trips. As a bonus, since last July, a new storage space has been opened: CEWE myPhotos to save, classify and share your photos wherever you are in a free 15 GB cloud.

The Photobox creation tool is very simple (unlike its application) and the site offers a creation wizard if needed to go even faster. You can drag and drop your photos directly into the online editor to start organizing the album. The site also allows you to import your photos directly from a cloud service like Google Photo or Dropbox, which is very convenient if all your images are saved there. Moreover, you can also save your photos on the Photobox website in a free space. In case of problems, a real-time chat is available from the creation tool to ask your questions. The site also allows you to create calendars, wall decorations, shells, mugs and magnets, photo puzzles, cushions, coasters, masks, games, etc.

You can also print on canvas and create a large repositionable adhesive photo board. Photobox is a heavyweight in the online photo printing market, producing more than 2 million photo books in France each year.

Flexilivre specializes in the creation of albums and photo frames only. The site offers an excellent value for money with a small price format from 6 € for 10 pages in 21x15cm. You will find a wide range of themes and formats as well as specific albums for your Instagram and Facebook photos.

Very practical, you can import creations in Word, PowerPoint or PDF format in order to add them to your album.Since this summer, a new version of the website (and the application) offers more simplicity and fluidity. More modern, it makes the tedious creation of albums almost enjoyable. Many keyboard shortcuts have been integrated to go faster and the integrated artificial intelligence allows to analyze the photos to group them and classify them more easily.

Finally, more than 3000 new stickers have been added to enrich the creations. Another good point for Flexilivre is that the French company, based in Bègles, is committed to printing its albums on PEFC paper from sustainably managed forests from an “Imprim’Vert” certified printing plant in France.

The Fizzer website, which specializes in sending classic postcards or magnets with its own photos, invitations and personalized gazettes, has just added the creation of photo albums to its offer. For the moment, the site only offers one album format of 20x20cm, from 24 to 78 pages. Fizzer focuses on sharing the albums created with friends and family. You can save your address book to send your albums, the shipping costs will be the same everywhere in the world whether in Britain or Australia.

Fizzer works with a system of decreasing credits which can be interesting if you have a lot of albums to make. The first pack of 10 credits is 21,90 € and allows you to create an album of 24 photos on 26 pages. But if you take the big pack of 150 credits at 249,90 €, the album of 24 photos will cost you 16,70 €. Shipping is included. Also available on iOS and Android

MyPoster offers an online or on-site editor to quickly create your album. Founded in 2010 and based in Munich, Myposter is an easy to use service with a very intuitive editor. The site offers the possibility to import your photos via your smartphone by scanning a QR code. No need to pair or install the application, the circuit is smooth and instantaneous, provided you are connected to the internet, wifi or cellular (be careful with your data plan). All you have to do is scan the QR code that appears on the Myposter website with your phone. It opens a site where you can import your selection of photos that will be sent directly to your online album.

A virtual assistant allows you to let the site’s algorithm quickly create the album for you from the album style and format, the layout template and the photos that will be placed in order by date, name or manually. The templates and clip arts are a bit too classic and too limited in some categories like animals or babies, but the templates, grids and backgrounds are pretty cool.

Our other online photo album tests

Myphotobook offers a complete photo album service, but also photo gifts, cards, calendars, single prints and wall decorations. The online editor is very simple and quick to learn. It allows automatic layout with assistance or manual layout. You can import photos up to 25 MB per photo, but it does not support .heic format.

Dans l’éditeur les clip arts, cadres et polices sont nombreux et offrent un mix de choix classique ou basic mais aussi de propositions plus modernes. Tout se positionne facilement et se personnalise sans problème. Dans la phase finale, le transfert des photos est un peu lent, vous aurez besoin d’une minute pour une douzaine de photos. La livraison est ensuite assez rapide sous 8 jours.

With its minimalist design, Cheerz is well in line with the trends and makes you want to create the most beautiful photo albums. The site is rather competitive in price, but does not offer an editor to download on your computer. However, you can use its application to do everything on a tablet or Apple or Android smartphone.

The creation of albums is very simplified and therefore easy to achieve, however the tools are quite limited with only 3 fonts and no cliparts or backgrounds or masks. If needed, a creation wizard proposes to put the photos on the page by itself, according to the chronological order, you can then make the necessary adjustments. Cheerz also offers to print photos on canvas, magnets, wall decorations, calendars and advent calendar with Kinder chocolate. The site also offers a photo booth rental service with instant printing (or Photobooth) to liven up your parties (300 € with 900 photo prints included).

If you already use Google Photo to store your photos in the cloud, you know how powerful the tool is. Just type a word and it finds the corresponding pictures. A valuable tool that allows us to find our way through the multitude of photos we take. The album creation and printing tool is also simple and powerful. In a few minutes, it will lay out your photos and can also make your albums by itself. The Google editor would be perfect if it offered creative tools to personalize and embellish the albums. Google assures that the paper used is high quality and responsibly sourced. The albums are printable from 12,99 € (0,49 € per page).

My Photo Album offers an easy to use and very complete creation tool. It allows you to create an album online or on your computer by downloading the editor, which is barely 20 Mb. The cliparts and masks available to decorate the albums are varied and modern and the layout suggestions are original with quite creative layouts. The site allows you to create posters, photos on canvas, aluminum, plexiglass or Forex prints (light plastic). What to redecorate your home with your most beautiful photos. You will also find the classic thank you cards, announcements, greeting cards and invitations. The site, like its competitors, offers discounts of 25 to 30% for the fall. Take advantage of a 5 € discount by subscribing to the newsletter.

This photo service offers a good quality/price ratio and a rather correct printing quality. If the homepage is a bit confusing with too much information everywhere, the creation tool is simple and pleasant to use. The site offers a downloadable editor to create an album without having to be connected to the internet. A wizard allows to create easily and quickly the albums. The site offers to make modern and very practical photo books in Instagram format, however, the many themes offered are sorely lacking modernity …

If you have an Instax instant camera from Fuji, a whole range of accessories as well as creative cards and albums are available on the site in this specific format to showcase your Instax shots. You can take advantage of the back-to-school season to get a 35% discount on orders of 35 € or more, or take part in the virtual photo exhibition to get 50% off the photo deco range.

Everything is easy in the creation of albums on the Photoweb platform. No need to follow a tutorial or ask for advice, the buttons are clear and many operations are done by drag and drop. Photos and texts can be organized with the mouse on the screen to resize, delete or modify them. The site offers about fifteen rather design and modern fonts to make a beautiful album. Everything must be done online, because Photoweb does not offer a downloadable editor, which means that you will have to be connected to the Internet to work on your album. The site also allows you to make photo prints, calendars, diaries, wall decorations and personalized items. Photoweb also offers mobile applications dedicated to photography such as Lalalab, Piiics and Jooméo (all owned by Exacompta-Clairefontaine).

This is the good surprise of our comparison. Pixum has the creative tools and printing quality of CEWE, but at a slightly lower price. The only difference with CEWE is that there are fewer book formats. The editor is quick and easy to use, but it’s a shame it doesn’t offer more modern fonts. On the other hand, it allows you to choose from many embossing options for the cover (gold, silver, copper, varnish) and offers a stapled binding for small albums. A good option also for recipe booklets or school presentations. Finally, for 5 € (without shipping costs) you can test the photo papers before ordering, because Pixum offers a sample shipment of papers. The creation is done online or via an editor to download.

Vistaprint becomes Vista. The French brand Vistaprint, well known for more than 20 years by companies for their printing work and for a few years for the manufacture and printing of photo albums, is reorganizing and regrouping all its services under the brand Vista. This is the result of the acquisition of Depositphotos and its subsidiary Crello, renamed VistaCreate, a serious competitor of Canva. Vista now includes VistaPrint, 99designs by Vista, Vista x Wix. The Vista site is thus fully oriented towards the creation of websites and digital content for social networks.

In the midst of all this, the offer of photo albums for individuals remains! The service is still well hidden on the site behind the menu Greeting Cards & Gifts, then Photo Gifts. It is one of the sites that offer the widest choice of photo album sizes with 8 formats available. You can either work online or download the photo editor to your computer. No need to register to start your album, the startup is very fast. The editor is complete with many possibilities of creation. This richness is also its weak point, because it will take some time to get the hang of the editor if you have never used a software of this type. But after a few tries, you will be able to make very creative albums! The site also allows you to create many photo products such as calendars, posters, invitations, objects and clothes or even websites.

Originally designed to make photo albums from your Android or iOS smartphone, Lalalab photo editor is also available on the web. The online editor is the same as on the app, but you won’t be able to choose the square format with soft cover, nor the Little Things Mini Book. Lalalab offers few formats and options, and the editor is usable online only, you will not be able to download it to your computer. However, if you use the mobile application, you will be pleasantly surprised by its ease of use and the speed with which you can create an album in a few clicks. The service created by the Nancy-based startup in 2012 and acquired by the Exacompta-Clairefontaine group in 2016 is now used by over 8 million users and available in 80 countries.

What price for a photo album?

We have compared the prices of 12 websites for the creation of a square photo album of size 20x20cm, 21x21cm or 22x22cm, with a hard cover and 26 pages. The prices vary a lot and change regularly according to the promotions. You have almost permanently offers at -40 or -50%.

Promotions not to be missed

So be careful with these promotions which Photoweb, Photobox and MonAlbumPhoto are specialists. They are offered on their website, but also often on private sales websites like Veepee. Be careful with the conditions of these promotions. You often pay for your album in advance and then you have a time limit for the creation of your album (usually quite long) beyond which you lose your purchase.

Beware of hidden costs

Finally, look also at the hidden costs like at Myfujifilm which adds a processing fee of 1,90€ at the end. This allows them to display more attractive prices on the front, but in the end they are exactly in the general average around 28-29€ for a 26 page square book. Only Cheerz offers a lower price at 24,90€. To all these prices are added variable shipping costs at 1 or 2€, except for Fizzer which works with a credit system that includes shipping costs. The total price of Fizzer in this example of a 26 page square photo book, is 33,44€ above average, but with shipping costs included around 5€, Fizzer comes back to the average of 28/29€ for this example of an album.

In conclusion, even if your photo book is finished, it is better to wait for a discount to order it. Another way to save money is to order several photo books, after a wedding or a baptism for example. In this case, all the services offer a discount depending on the number of albums ordered.

How easy is it to create an online photo album?

All of them use an easy-to-use creation tool and more or less equivalent functions. So why choose this or that website to create a photo book? It all depends on the level of customization and precision you need. Even to create the most beautiful photo books, you don’t need to have any knowledge of photography, imaging or retouching. No matter which site you use, the creation is accessible to everyone. Three methods are proposed on all the sites: the automatic assistant, the autonomous online creation or the autonomous creation via an editor to download on your computer.

The quick and easy solution: the automatic assistant

This is the feature that has grown the most in recent years in photo book services: automatic integration, often called “creation wizard” or “automatic editor”. On paper, it’s simple, fast and adjustable. In reality, there are big differences in performance between the different wizards. If you had to rate them on this point, the vast majority would not get the average.

In the end, this “turnkey” solution will require many adjustments and will only save you a little time. Creating your photo book without this automatic filling also allows you to bring a more personal vision. Moreover, the automatic function is rather adapted to albums with few photos. If your album is dense, it will take longer to make adjustments afterwards!

For those who want to create everything from scratch online

Here the starting point is the blank page. It is up to you to decide where your photos and texts will be placed and how you want to highlight them (texts, frame, effects, contours, relief). This solution is simpler than it looks. You get the hang of the software quickly and you understand its subtleties quite quickly. And if you are a bit lost, all the services provide help by phone, chat or video tutorials. This is the method that takes the most time, but it is the one that offers the most freedom. You are accompanied in every step by the site if needed, so don’t panic. Most sites alert you as soon as the position is not perfect on the margins, the definition too low, on the possible cropping or the texts to insert. You can of course modify the order of the pages, add or remove some. The backups are regular and automatic and the sites keep your albums in memory for several months if needed.

For those who want to create everything from A to Z via a downloadable editor

In this selection, Vistaprint, CEWE, MyFujifilm, MonAlbumPhoto, Pixum, offer a photo album creation software to download on your computer. This allows you to create your album even without an internet connection and avoids the time it takes to download the photos when importing them. Everything will be imported online in one go at the end. These editors also sometimes offer more features than online editing, but most of them are identical to the editing tools offered on the site. Beware of the size of the software to download, the MyFujifilm one is more than 623Mb and the CEWE one 238Mb, do you still have enough space on your hard drive for that?

Watch out for the built-in tools for customizing your photo album

Online and offline photo album creation software offer editing tools of varying quality. These tools are important if you really want to customize your album. Sites like Google Photo, Fizzer, Cheerz and Pixum offer very few different fonts while Vistaprint or Photoweb have a plethora. Many have catalogs of backgrounds, images and cliparts, but some, like MyFujifilm, don’t have the most trendy ones…

Wedding, birth, vacations: what are the themes for?

Are you short of ideas or creativity? The themes are made for you. Since photo books are often made for special events (weddings, births, birthdays, trips, etc.), album publishers have had the good idea of making pre-formatted books available to users. Whether it is by their colors, the backgrounds chosen or their shape. They facilitate the creation of a photo book by providing a turnkey structure. Most of the time, all you have to do is put the right photos in the right places to end up with a successful book.

But themes can also be used as a basis for work. They are not blocking and you are free to change the structure of a page if you do not like it. When it comes to themes, Photobox and Flexilivres certainly offer the widest choice.

Which format for my photo album?

This is the first criterion: what shape to give to your photo book? Square, portrait or landscape? And in what size? The choice is quite large, but not all sites offer the same variety of formats. Google Photo or Fizzer, for example, offer very little choice of formats.

Print quality, which paper and finishes to choose?

Dull ? Glossy ? Satin ? Glossy ? Classic ? Premium… Make your choice. On this point, all services are similar, but beware that some papers like those of Cheerz or Google are FSC® certified (Forest Stewardship Council for responsible forest management). Prefer a thick paper of at least 200 g/m for a nice rendering. If you are looking for a classic photo look, especially if you take your photos with a nice camera, choose a premium glossy paper. Glossy film gives more contrast to photos and depth to colors.

The print tested at CEWE is flawless with a solid binding and neat finishes. The colors come out well, even if the glossy paper could have been even more brilliant! At Photobox also the printing is impeccable and the matte finish is very qualitative.

Be careful with the choice of bindings. A flat opening can double the price of the album but will offer a high end finish to your book. If it is dense, a flat opening will help you to leaf through it without damaging it, even if with time, it might get a little tired as the Photobox book binding is starting to show, 3 years after its creation.

Cover: soft or hard, with window?

The choice of the cover is also important. For most of the services we tested, it is possible to choose between a soft or hard cover and relief or varnish effects like at Pixum or CEWE. Photobox offers a “window” on the cover of its A4 luxury photo book, Vistaprint and Myfujifilm allow a leatherette cover.

The number of pages, or how to increase the bill

The page is the nerve of the war. The number of pages is one of the criteria that makes the price of a photo book vary the most. So you have to pay attention to the price of the extra page. The problem is that the offer is not clear. Between those who propose to buy the extra page by unit (Photoweb, Photoservice, Albelli) and those who only sell packs of pages, by 4 or by 8. You should know that on average, the price per page is around 0,60€ / 0,80€.

How long does it take to receive my photo album?

The 12 sites in this guide offer approximately the same manufacturing and delivery times. From 3 to 6 days for manufacturing and the same for delivery. If you are in a hurry, some sites offer an express service. The Fizzer site delivers anywhere in the world for the same price.