Remember the days when you had to go to the store to get your photos printed off so you can create a photo album to show to your friends and family? Some people, especially the younger generation never have or will ever experience that. The reason why is because, these days, there are many desktop apps and products which print off your photos immediately without you having to leave home. With the recent announcement Google made at I/O 2017, now it’s even easier to get an album of your favorite photos via the Google Photos App.
What this means is ordering photo books through your phone. The recent update for the Photo app on iOS and Android lets you use your phone to order an album of your favorite chosen photos using Google’s AI. Of course, you could’ve done this with Google photos before, but it was only available on desktop and not phones.
Users can now order 7-inch, 20-page softcover albums for $10 and 9-inch, 20-page for $20. Of course, there is a catch though: you can only order these if you live in the US.
This service isn’t necessarily new. There are apps out there who provide this service as well like FreePrints Photobooks, Chatbooks, and Shutterfly just to name a few. And, as it is, these apps are free of charge to use.
The prices and the quality vary depending on the app. Specifically talking about the Google Photos app along side with the new album feature mentioned above you can create collages, GIFs, panoramas and edit all your photos as well. With FreePrints Photobooks, you can get one free 5×7 standard cover photo book every month. They have 6×8 and 8.5×11.5 hardcovers as well. The standard pages are 20, but you can add more with a little extra charge. The shipping cost is $7.99, and the good thing is that it doesn’t change even if you were to order 10 photobooks.With Chatbooks a photo book is automatically made when you add sixty photos from any of your photo apps or social media tools. They boast no shipping cost, charging only $8 per book.
Lastly, with Shutterfly, you can not only create photo books but you can also create wedding invitations, birth announcement cards, etc. You can even create your photo gifts as notebooks, journals and glass ornaments. That’s what I call variety.
These are only some of the many options that are available in numerous countries especially in the US and Canada. Google hasn’t said anything about their new feature being available anywhere other than the US so far but we can only wait and see how well their newest feature stacks up against the existing competition.
