Getting your own quality wedding photo album: where?

Dostoevsky

We have the option to get our photo album with our photographer. We are now thinking of doing this ourselves.

Where would be the best place to start? What sort of albums would be top quality? Are there any reputable sites that would do this?

I've uploaded photos to Shutterfly and Kodak albums throughout the years and they're fine for ordinary albums. What places could I upload these photos to for a top quality wedding album? Or where in Ireland would do good quality albums at a decent price?

Toots

I got my album from Wedding Albums & More and I'm absolutely thrilled with it! We went for a 'traditional' album (not a story book type), with this site you pick the album you want, how many pages you'd like, what type of borders etc, and how many photos you want on a page. I got the album and mounts from them and ordered my photos from photobox.ie. It was really easy to put the pictures in the album, I had the whole thing done in about an hour. I don't normally gush about stores/websites, but I'd recommend these without any hesitation, they're excellent!

Senna

My wife's fiends got her a storybook album for her hen party, it was just pictures of them all together through the years, but it looked excellent and didn't cost the world.
So i'm sure there are websites that will make up an album of the same quality as a photographer, without the expense.

Fionn

here are some of the cheaper places online, theres lots others too;

myphotobook
photobox
foto.com
snapfish
fujipix
aldiphotos
blurb.com
shakespearephotobooks

if you want top quality, it'll cost, the likes of
asukabook
queensberry albums
graphistudio

will usually only deal with trade, so you'd need to convince them that your a your in the photographer business full-time.

lily09

Got mine off shutterfly.com. leather bound Inc p&p 60 euro.

brownej

I put together my sisters wedding album and used loxleycolour.com in Scotland. Sterling is bad at the moment so not exactlythe best option now.
Putting together your own wedding album is both time consuming and expensive. There is a reason that professionals charge a fortune and it is because it actually costs a fortune to get a quality album.
Before you decide to do it yourself take a look at plenty of your friends wedding albums so that you have a good idea of how to put one together.

I did a storybook album and it took alot of time and effort. You need to choose the correct pictures to put in. If there are multiple pictures on the same page you need to ensure that the pictures look well together. you need to pick pictures that look well as backgroound pictures etc.
If you had a good photographer you'll find pictures on the disc where you are wondering why he took the picture, and it's probably because he thought it would make a good background image.
You also need to make sure you don't use the same layouts on every page as it gets repetitive.

The good thing about doing your own is that you can do what you want.

My advice would be to stay away from the cheap ones as you get what you pay for. It is your wedding album and you want it to be special. The cheaper ones are fine for holiday snaps or hen nights but there is a big difference between them and the quality "expensive" ones.
Depending on the size and the number of pictures and pages and type you will be looking at €300 upwards. They aint cheap.

pwurple

We used myphotobook.com and chose the premium range. There is a leather cover available with this as well.

Delighted with it. It took us months every evening working on it to do the layout, choose pictures, do an additional bit of editing on the photos (cropping, colour adjust etc) but we are both into photography anyway, so enjoyed the process. It would be a bit of a slog if you weren't into it I guess.

I've never liked the background images that photographers use, always preferred a cleaner look, so we got exactly what we wanted. You can put in background images of course as well. I had tried a few sites for the design, and found myphotobook the most flexible (you can design your own layouts) but also the more expensive of the standard ones.

We were also able to put in a few extra photos from friends that the photographer didn't have, plus some from when we got engaged, and one from our honeymoon.

Very happy with the result. It came to around 150 euro.

zedweb

We got ours from the wedding album boutique. We were really happy with ours. They are very like the ones our photographer had but far cheaper! Their website is www.weddingalbumboutique.com

almorris

The reason wedding photographers (me) charge what they do for albums is the amount of work that goes into an album. It's not just the layout, it's the retouching, color correction, cropping and multiple revisions. If the photographer hasn't been consistent in shooting the wedding ie lighting, then the photos all look different and look like they've been cobbled together. As some other poster's have said, it can take a lot of time to put together. And then there is the quality, as others have said. The question is this -What do you want to show your grandchildren in years to come?