Photo Book Design Tools – Which One to Choose?

Professionals vs Hobbyists

Do you really need a sledgehammer to crack a walnut? In the wide, wonderful world of photo book design, you’ll find two main camps: the pros and the everyday hobbyists. Let’s dive into which tools suit what group, shall we?

For the pros, it’s all about the bells and whistles. Their preferred software is like the Swiss Army knife of photo book design – packed with tools for tweaking and perfecting every pixel. Need precise color management and fancy layouts? You got it. Some software even plays Tetris with your photos, dynamically fitting them perfectly on the page. Names like Fundy Designer, Pixellu SmartAlbums, and AlbumStomp pop up in this category. These power tools usually come with a hefty price tag, either a one-time purchase or a subscription. If designing a Cahoots photo book, you’ll find Fundy Designer has got your back with pre-configured product choices, though you’ll need to design any printed covers separately (for now). Otherwise, if using other desktop software, you will need to make sure your book’s dimensions match the specifications for your selected Cahoots product.

On the flip side, the casual photo book makers are all about keeping things easy-peasy. Their ideal solution is your friendly neighbourhood photo book buddy, offering pre-designed templates and simple layouts. No need to be a design guru here; it’s all about dragging and dropping your way to a beautiful book. While you won’t find some of the pro-level editing and layout tools, there’s still plenty to play with, like basic cropping, fun filters, and clip art embellishments.

At Cahoots, we’re always on the lookout for tools that strike that perfect balance of simplicity and functionality. As technology evolves and the pressure to keep costs down grows, we’re leaning increasingly towards online, web-based design tools. It’s all about making sure you get the best of both worlds: ease of use and quality, without breaking the bank. Futhermore, we are moving away from the usual business model of free design software that can only be processed through Cahoots (vendor lock in). We now offer the possibility to use the desktop software of your choice – and deal with the output as you wish. All of the tools below can be used on macOS or Windows without vendor lock in, giving you the freedom to produce print quality PDF files and freely share those with friends and loved ones.

Our Recommended Tools

The free option: Cinch

Our first recommendation is to try Cinch, our free web based design tool. It is recommended for those that make simple photo books and/or only make one book per year or so.

 

There are only two caveats. If you are working on a long term project, desktop software is instead recommended. Cinch projects are deleted after 12 weeks of inactivity. The other downside is that text handling is limited to a fixed number of characters per text box. If you have more than a couple of sentences, you will need to stack text boxes to make the text look the way you envisage.  Thus, if you have a text heavy project, we’d suggest desktop software is preferable.

The cheap option: YouDesign Photo Book

If you make at least a couple of books per year, or you find Cinch unsuitable, your next option could be YouDesign Photo Book. It is a comprehensive book design tool that has most of the expected design functionality. It has a range of included backgrounds, clip art, effects, and a number of themed designs to kickstart your project. The cost is reasonable and not significant if you have a number future projects in mind. (Cahoots will partly offset the purchase price with vouchers if you purchase using our affiliation link). Once you let us know you have made your purchase, we return the commission back to you.) We advise purchasing the standard version in the first instance. You can later upgrade to the PRO version if ever you feel the need.

On the downside, it isn’t possible to paste text from the system clipboard (e.g. taken from a spell checked Word document). It has to be typed directly into the text box. [Update: If Ctrl+V doesn’t work, you can right-click with the mouse to bring up the contextual popup menu and choose Paste.] Unfortunately, it isn’t possible to save your custom layouts for future use. A trial version of YouDesign Photo Book is available to test before purchasing a license. HOWEVER, if you would like to proceed with a license purchase you MUST use this link if you wish to avail yourself of the 2 x $20 vouchers which result from the affiliation commission that Cahoots receives. If you instead use the purchase link in the software itself or the link in any emails from Aquasoft – Cahoots gets no commission, so no vouchers can be supplied :-(

The Jack of All Trades: Album Express

Album Express is aimed at the  professional photo book designer, but is also worth considering if you are a dedicated photo book design enthusiast just wanting a truly comprehensive design tool. The underlying technology was the basis of Cahoots Pizazz software that was in use several years ago for Mac users. This is the unrestricted commercial version that can output full resolution files. While the list price is not inexpensive, it can occasionally be found for 50% off, making it good value. It has all the functions required for any design treatments imaginable. Bespoke layouts can be saved for future use, and alternative layouts offered for any given page/spread.

The interface can look somewhat daunting at first, so not recommended for those who find new software challenging to get to grips with. (It looks very much like Photoshop in many respects.) For technical reasons, one may need to design books one single page at a time (rather than the usual double page spreads). However, Cahoots can supply a set of page layout templates that are very similar to those found in previous iterations of our software. They are available in separate folders – one for left hand pages and the other for right hand pages – and they need to be applied separately, with the latter set being applied with the menu command “add to page” (otherwise the layout on the left page would be discarded upon applying the right hand layout, using the default command). A trial version of Album Express v8 is available to test before purchasing a license.

Poor Man’s Fundy: AlbumStomp

We’d classify AlbumStomp as a tool for professional photographers (its target market), but it is also an affordable option for anyone who wants to pack several photos onto single pages effortlessly. Like its more expensive peers, one can drag photos onto the page and let the software tesselate them into suggested layouts, from its inbuilt library. Usually images are slightly cropped in this process, but one can adjust the crop and image size as needed. Dynamic guides help with alignment.  There are some basic tools for margins, borders, backgrounds, and text. The interface is relatively user friendly and self explanatory.

There are only limited “effects”, and nothing in the way of clip art, or image editing. This software is recommended for those who value having the software suggest layout options, and having automatic alignment of images within the selected layout. On the downside you don’t have the range of design treatments available from alternative tools, such as Album Express. In summary, this tool is great for just getting photos neatly arranged with relatively little effort. A trial version of AlbumStomp is available to test before purchasing a license.

The Full Monty: Fundy Designer

Like AlbumStomp, Fundy Designer is aimed at professional photographers. As well as album (photo book) design, it offers a number of other design tools for use by photographers. It has very similar functionality to AlbumStomp but possibly with a few more bells and whistles (and associated complexity). In particular, it can cope with automagically tessellating large numbers of photos in a predefined aspect ratio (“original” i.e. without cropping, 4:3, square, etc.). This makes for very efficient page designs for densely populated pages. Cahoots products are defined in the Fundy Designer product selector so the output will have the correct dimensions.

Fundy Designer is an expensive outlay, but can occasionally be found 20-30% off. There are only limited “effects”, and nothing in the way of clip art, or comprehensive image editing (there is however an add-on for skin retouching!). This software is recommended for those who value maximising large numbers of photos on most pages, over and above the possible range of design treatments available from alternative tools, such as Album Express and YouDesign Photo Book. With a little more functionality comes a slightly more complex interface compared to AlbumStomp. A trial version of Fundy Designer is available to test before purchasing a license.

The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

We’ve tabulated a comprehensive high level comparison of the main features of the above mentioned tools. In conjunction with our recommendations you may wish to take a deeper look at what each option offers. In the meantime, we are continuously looking at how to make things as easy as possible for customers to create and submit books using any of these tools. To that end we are working to create a number of blank  “template” files that are preconfigured with all the required settings/dimensions that match our products. If you don’t find what you need for any of the above software options, get in touch and we’ll do our best to create one for you, or at the very least supply our book product dimensions.

Happy designing!