A few months ago at Google I/O, they unveiled a new feature to the beloved Google Photos app: Photo Books. Where you can take your pics from your Google Photos account and put them in physical album: soft or hard cover. All of this within the app (desktop & mobile).
Since all I/O attendees got a free code to try it out on the house. Of course, with everything going on, I forgot about it until the day it expired as I only had 10 minutes to put something together for free or pay for it later. So I made sure to put together several photos revolving around the birth of my son.
This is cool as Google gives you the chance to go analog a bit w/ your digital memories. And the pricing for it all ain’t bad either. A 20-page soft cover will cost you $10 w/ $0.35 per extra page and a 20-page hard cover will cost you $20 w/ $0.65 per extra page.
The quality of the Photo Book was overall impressive.
I opted for the hard cover as I saw that it would be a better feel. So putting it together is pretty straight forward – for the most part. You can only pick 1 photo per page and you can’t adjust the layout. However, you can choose how much of a white border you want around your photo. So if you’re looking for more flexibility, this is when you get what you pay for. Add a title to the front or it and on the spine of the book. Checkout & pay for it & shipping and wait for it to arrive. Or more so, wait for an email letting you know that it has shipped w/ a tracking number.
Most of the photos I chose for the album for taken w/ a Pixel XL and they look pretty damn-good blown up. Not flawless but pretty impressive for a smartphone camera. A few photos from the baby shower were taken w/ a Nikon DSLR & the rest on my Sony NEX-7. These were all uploaded to my Google Photos acct.
For the most part, the process is pretty quick other than taking a few weeks to arrive. The quality of the Photo Book was overall impressive. The quality of the paper, the cover, and translation of the photos onto the pages all came out spectacular. Definitely getting a good value out of it. Of course, as good as this came out, this was a beta test for me as I will upload some more photos and put together a more concise album for the little guy.
Have you used Google’s Photo Books yet? If not, will you give a shot now that we’ve made sure it’s good?
