Review: Baby’s First Photobook by PhotoBox
When online digital photo printing company PhotoBox, told us about their brand new Baby’s First Photo Album, not only did we think it looked gorgeous, but it also struck a chord.
The modern day parent paparazzi takes photographs of their child from day one by the dozen. Despite modern technology making this cheaper, easier and generally foolproof, those precious shots remain too easily on hard drives rather than being lovingly placed in the easy to flip through albums used by our parent’s generation.
Having the time and room space to file our own traditional family albums into a concise and pretty package has just been made easier by Photobox.
The popular photo publishing and online community website will be familiar to Bounty members as the company have forged a strong relationship with the pregnancy and parenting club and also children’s charity NSPCC.
The Baby’s First Photo Album is one of their brand new products for parents, children and family to love and treasure. It comes in an A4 size with a spine, strong hardback cover and fully customisable design.
The interface is incredibly simple and user-friendly. To get started, you choose the style of Photobook you would like. It’s best to choose the photographs you want to use in advance and upload them in one go. You can either order them yourself before upload, or order them how you like once they have been uploaded to PhotoBox.
Your photographs appear in a line above your working space. From here, you can drag and drop each image into a fully customisable page layout that you choose. You can either stick with simple photographs layouts, or choose designs which have text boxes for you to include your precious memories. You can save your project to come back and work on at leisure or create it all in one sitting.
There is no need to worry if your photographs will come out well or not. A clever smiley face system will help you with this. Sad red faces warn you that the photograph you are choosing, at the size you are choosing at, will not print well. Happy little green faces let you know that your image will print well. If the software is concerned about any of the images, it will warn you before you place your order. The higher the resolution of your photographs, the better quality product you will end up with.
Chopsy Baby Verdict:
We created a really beautiful Baby’s First Year Photobook that sparked the interest and imagination of the parents we showed it to.
It’s wonderful being able to see those precious early photographs out in the open in such a lovely book instead of safely stored on a computer and rarely seen.
The compact book lives happily on a book shelf and can be quickly taken down for those nostalgic moments or when relatives come over. It takes the pain out of having to fire up the PC or wade through hundreds of packets of loose snaps.
The flexibility that the programme offers in allowing you to choose layouts and design was excellent, as was the ease of use and ordering process. The software, which was fully contained on the PhotoBox website without having to download any extra programs ran well. It didn’t crash, caused no added drain on the internet and amazingly, worked perfectly with Windows Vista.
We were incredibly impressed with our final product. The quality of images was exactly as we expected due to the PhotoBox smiley face warning system. Photographs taken on old low pixel camera phones still came out reasonably well, but for a stunning quality and finish, try to scan in good quality photographs or use those with high resolutions.
We opted to remove the PhotoBox logo on the rear cover and chose premium quality paper. These two reasonably priced extras are worth it as you end up with a truly fantastic finished product. We also felt that postage and packaging at £3.99 was a good deal in comparison to other photography services we have used in the past.
The PhotoBox Photobook is the perfect economical system for creating an album each year. The books are easily storable, displayable and would make up a lovely close-to-hand collection in the living room. You will still have your hard drive full of the growing millions of photographs of every imaginable milestone, but every now and again over a cup of tea, you can warm your heart with a lovely snap shot of one of the precious years in the life of your child.
Prices for our A4 personalised Photobook
A 26 page Photobook starts at £23.99
Additional two pages are £1.50
To remove the PhotoBox logo from the rear cover and replace with a photograph of your choice is £2.00
Premium quality paper £2.99
P&P £3.99 for classic A4 Photobooks with the option to choose Special Delivery options.