viovio.com

Ever thought you had the ability to create your own book? Been put off by high production costs? Got some great photos and a story you want to share? Viovio has lots to offer.

I love digital photography - it is so tolerant of my mistakes and I can correct loads of them and end up with some half decent shots. However when I have taken them all I then need a way of displaying them, and keeping them for the future, and to be frank I am ...
...the newer developments in the photo market is the advent of the photo book and many of the traditional photo processing sites offer them now - but they are costly (in my view) and they are rather like a standard album to use.

The idea of a photo book is that you can gather together all your favourite photos, compile them together, attach a few captions and get the whole lot published into a book format for showing to friends and relatives. ... more

Ever thought you had the ability to create your own book? Been put off by high production costs? Got some great photos and a story you want to share? Viovio has lots to offer.

I love digital photography - it is so tolerant of my mistakes and I can correct loads of them and end up with some half decent shots. However when I have taken them all I then need a way of displaying them, and keeping them for the future, and to be frank I am not a great fan of photo albums. One of the newer developments in the photo market is the advent of the photo book and many of the traditional photo processing sites offer them now - but they are costly (in my view) and they are rather like a standard album to use.

The idea of a photo book is that you can gather together all your favourite photos, compile them together, attach a few captions and get the whole lot published into a book format for showing to friends and relatives. It is a great way to keep pictures of a memorable holiday, a lifetime event or a favourite subject all together and you can use the text to provide a commentary. I have looked at quite a lot of sites offering this kind of service and discovered that Viovio offers something a little different to many of the others.

They offer a wide range of book options with book sizes of
Landscape: 9"x7" / 23x18 cm and 14"x11" / 35x28cm
Portrait: 8.5"x11" / 21x28cm and 6"x9" / 15x23cm

You can choose to have the pages glossy or matt finish and they are in the process of developing a hardback cover as well as their usual softback option which is currently available for one size only. Your cover can have a photo of your choice on both the front and the back and you can set up a title on the front, to be also repeated along the spine (the latter only available if your book is thick enough!).

The base price starts at $4.99 plus $0.25 per page (when you get to the stage of ordering your book the web site will helpfully calculate prices for you in £ if you select the option on the page). The Viovio service is quite competitive when compared to other players in the market place.

On Viovio you start the process by registering with the site and then you can create an online album to store all your photos. You don't need to worry about the order in which you dowload the pictures as you can easily manipulate them when you are ready to create your book. There is a very helpful 'frequently asked questions' section to help you with producing the book and, should you get stuck, they offer various ways to contact them for assistance including a live IM system which I tried and found was excellent. You have a choice of ways in which to produce the book. You can use their system to assemble all your photos together choosing which images you wish to present 'full bleed' (filling the whole page) and which you want to caption and you can select how many images you want per page. If you are a little more adventurous you can use a publishing package of your own to produce print ready PDFs from which they can print direct. I chose to create some of my pages in MS Powerpoint with text and images on the pages and then to save each page as a JPEG file and produce a book that way and I was very pleased with the results. If you want you can create your own text pages in this way as save as a JPEG so that you print as much text on the pages as you wish.

You get ample opportunities to preview your book during the process so that you can experiment to your hearts content before you finally decide that you are happy. Once created it is simple to order although a word of warning here, as with many sites postage on small orders works out quite expensive so you may wish to order more than one product to make it economic.

The only drawback to the site from my point of view is that because it is based in the US you do have to wait a couple of weeks sometimes before the book actually arrives (and I have always been an impatient soul!). That said they do advise you when the goods have been despatched and I did find the end result was well worth the wait. They are very keen to ensure that you are happy with the end result and appear to welcome all feedback, good or bad. I had a query about the paper on one order and they gave me a credit against my next order without any quiblle at all.

If you are short if ideas then a look through the photo gallery on their site will show you various public albums (you can opt for either public or private albums when you set them up). The uses seem to be endless - there are lots and lots of wedding albums, tons of baby and children's photos, dozens of memorable holidays, some family histories and countless 'team' books.

Once you have produced your book, if you are confident that you know people who would want to purchse it you can set up a retailer account and sell it through Viovio - if you are less ambitious then you can just tell your friends and family and let them order their own. My own view of this service is that is fun and a great way to store memories and the people at Viovio are always willing to help. 

...less