My son Logan was born on August 16th, 2009, but long before that I started work on a very special project: a baby book that would chronicle the process of my wife's pregnancy, our preparations for his arrival, and the first couple of weeks after he was born. This wasn't going to simply be a bunch of photos; I wanted to create a truly epic baby book, something that was off-the-charts unique and something that would become a family treasure.

I've wanted to use FotoFusion to create customized page layouts for a long time now, because I knew it would allow me to break the limited confines of what typical photo book software permitted. I had painstakingly created all the pages in FotoFusion, exported each page as a high-resolution JPEG file, and dropped the images into full-page layouts. I incorporated my green-screen scanning technique to add objects to the book, and once I was finished - a process that took eight months of work and around 200 hours in total - I had the book printed with Picaboo. The results were a complete disaster. The details are below under the review section for Picaboo, but the short version is that I was really unhappy with the physical representation of all my hard work and I wanted to get the books re-printed using a different service. But which service should I use?

I searched online for a comprehensive review of photo book printing services, and wasn't able to find any that answered this question: who makes the best consumer-grade photo books? It's not an easy question to answer, which is probably why I wasn't able to find any articles tackling the subject. In order to compare photo book printing services, someone would have to contact a broad cross-section of service providers in the USA and Canada (let's say a dozen in total), arrange for a free sample to be provided (because buying a 60-page photo book twelve times over would be $800+), build the same book with all of them (or as close as possible), factor in the book-building software component, then compare the eventual results of the physical books. Who'd be crazy enough to take on such a huge task? That would be me.

This review is likely the most intense writing project I've ever undertaken short of writing my last book. This project was six months in the making, required multiple re-workings of the baby book in FotoFusion to accommodate differences in book size/aspect ratios, and I believe is a unique effort on the Internet today in terms of scope and depth. I hope you find it useful, and if you do, please share it with your friends and family.

How To Read This Review

Because of the length of this review, there are three different ways to read it. If you're interested in seeing how each photo book printing service compares to each other, I encourage you to read it all the way through from start to finish. If you manage to do that, you're a superstar (this review clocks in at over 15,000 words). If you're interested in how a particular book building service is rated because you're interested in using them for a book project, jump to the individual section below:

• Picaboo
• Treasure-Book.com
• Blurb
• Inkubook
• Shutterfly
• AdoramaPix
• Kodak Gallery
• MyPublisher
• SnapFish
• ArtsCow
• Photobook Canada
• Mpix

Lastly, if you want to just skip to the conclusion to see the results of my tests (which includes an executive summary of each service), please feel free to do so.

One thing to note is that I'm not factoring in the "order to ship time" for this review. The reason why? Some of the vendors provided me with a coupon code that I could use to get my book printed for free, while others had me upload my book, processed my order, and manually discounted it later. This created a scenario where it was impossible for me to accurately gauge when the process truly started and finished.

Let's get started!