making a photo book

I have produced 3 books with Blurb. I have not used Lightroom to do it, but supposedly Lightroom can create the books. I have used the Bookify & Booksmart products in Blurb. At first I hated Blurb but once I got the hang of it I found Booksmart pretty good. Several page layout options and you can mix the page layouts. You can also have writing on your pages. The covers of the books are really nice. They are black and the photo you choose will really pop. I found the printed book and my computer screen to very close. You don't have to do it all in one sitting. It's a lot of work no doubt about it but it's nice to have. All three of mine are 12x12 roughly 80 pages and they ran about 80 a piece before discount coupons. There are always coupons! Take about 2 weeks to arrive after ordering.

Creating...

First check the maximum size you can upload, because your first step may be resizing photos for upload.  However, I believe this is no longer the issue it used to be, but, then again, with even your most basic cameras taking huge megapixel photos, it can be an issue.  

Realize that 300 pixels per inch provides great prints, so higher res is overkill.  The larger the size, the harder the upload.  Knowing what the company can handle is your first step.  

I believe they only handle jpgs, so check that out, too.

Most companies have ready made books where you just upload your photos and the drop them onto the pages. After the basic book is created, you can move the photos around, but get your photos in order prior to starting a book. Dropping random photos onto the templates will be very difficult, so putting your photos in order is essential.

You can create your own collages, save the page as a jpg and upload it as a single photo. You are not limited to using only their template pages, but the templates are so nice, you may be happy with them doing all the work.

If you create your own collages, keep in mind the edges of your page. Keep text away from the edge and all important photos need to be away from the edges or they may get chopped off during printing. The companies provide templates to help you avoid this.

You may be swayed more by their templates than by their prices, plus some software is easier to use than others. You can make books without ordering, so experiment by making sample books with few pages to see which company fits your needs.

I cannot recommend specific companies. I haven't printed a book in years, but as already been suggested, get a small book printed and see if you like their work first. Printing quality varies so - plus your own tolerance for less than perfect quality will enter into the picture (no pun intended). Realize, most of these companies are about mass production. I found the quality is on par with calendars you buy in the store - probably because these companies started out as custom calendar printers and branched out into books to meet digital Scrappers needs.

I used Blurb a couple of times in the past, but haven't printed a book for a number of years. However, my experience with Blurb was fantastic, having tried a different provider (whose name now escapes me) first for a cheaper book I was sorely disappointed with the colours, as they did not come out true to the original. Blurb on the other hand was exactly the colours I had and the quality of the end product was far superior to the other one.

Additionally, back then I found the Blurb software really easy to get on with, their many templates really helped me to get started and each template can be customized to your taste and requirements. They also offered discounts when ordering more than 1 book for print (at least they did back then).

Overall, I agree with Janice, take a look at a few providers, trial their software out, read other online reviews and see which one fits your requirements best.

www.flickr.com

I had all these photos up on the site already, so I went to the 'create book' part of the site and these are sample pages. Like I mentioned before, you have to worry about what is on the edges of your photo - as you can see, I'm losing the right edge of my itinerary box where the pages meet in the center.  And I lost the tip of the cruise ship in the large sized photo of the ship.

The size of the book and price is at the bottom.  93 pages cost $71.45 - Hardcover 11x8.5 book. That is probably full price - I didn't look around for a sale.

There are bars at the bottom of each page to increase and decrease the size of the photo. The photos came in at the smallest size and the only thing I could do would be to make them larger and shift them around. If I'm losing a part of the page, I don't think I can make them smaller to capture an edge that is lost. Most of these photos went onto this site as is. I didn't resize prior to upload.  You can tell what happens with a resized/cropped photo - it ends up with a white box around it like in the second example.

The pages with text were created in PSE.  I don't know how easy it is to, or even if you can, add text on the Flickr website itself.

Again - I never ordered a book from them, so I can't vouch for the quality of the book.  I can only vouch for the quality of the site.

www.shutterfly.com

What I like about Shutterfly is the design of their ready-made templates. I like the multi-photo pages.

I have seen Shutterfly books and calendars and they have the look of store-bought calendars -- not exactly the photo quality you are used to when getting prints, but they are pretty nice.

Those look like really great quality. I've talked about getting a book printed of some of my heritage layouts, but I've never gotten around to it. I guess it's because I don't know where to stop when choosing the layouts.