The research

Why you should trust us

Wirecutter has been testing photo-book services since 2017. For this guide:

• We’ve researched more than 50 companies and created nearly 30 albums since the first iteration of this guide.
• We’ve compiled a mixture of images from high-resolution DSLR cameras and iPhones, selecting specific examples for both color and resolution testing, and we’ve used them to directly compare the image quality of different albums.
• We’ve consulted several experts, including Taylor McAtee, master printer and owner of Stretch and Staple, a print shop in Seattle.
• We’ve crowdsourced input from friends who enjoy making albums with their family photos.

Who this is for

If you want to create an album of your digital photos, a photo-book service is absolutely the way to go. Today’s photo books look much sleeker and more elegant than the scrapbooks of old. They’re also much easier to replace if an original gets damaged.

Photo books can be customized to fit any purpose, including for a baby book, a family-trip album, or even a school yearbook. They also make great gifts for grandparents and other family members. And if you’re a photographer, photo books are a wonderful way to curate your work in something that can be reproduced for distribution.

If you want to make a fancier book to document a special event, such as a wedding, consider upgrading to a flush-mount, layflat album, which has a unique type of binding that allows two-page spreads to lie completely flat, with no crease in the middle. You could also consider choosing a more luxurious cover, such as leather or crushed silk, to match the occasion. Our upgrade pick features both.

If you have a collection of vintage photo albums or boxes of family photos sitting around, you might want to scan those photos and upgrade to a sleeker, modern photo book.

How we picked and tested


Erin Roberts for NYT Wirecutter

In researching online photo-book services, we looked for those that allow you to create a customizable book with captions and multiple photos on one page. We eliminated services that don’t let you at least arrange and reorder photos. And, on the flipside, we dismissed any that looked too technical or complex for people with no design experience.

Many photo-printing services offer frequent, deep discounts and promotions throughout the year, so it can be difficult to make an accurate pricing comparison — but holidays and annual shopping events are typically great times to finally purchase the albums that have been waiting in your cart. Otherwise, we can’t say for sure whether one service will be cheaper than another at any given time, so we prioritized services that offered basic, 20-page, approximately 8-by-11-inch books for under $50. Of course, we increased our budget considerably when testing premium photo books, but we continued to compare similar book sizes, page counts, and materials.

In general, these are the key features we considered:

• Customization options: The best photo-book services strike a fine balance between offering a creative, diverse range of editing options and overwhelming people with a dizzying range. The service should work for photo junkies and for people who just want to quickly make a wedding album.
• Intuitive photo-book software: The editing tools should be easy to grasp, even at an amateur level. Ideally, they should include all of the basics, such as a black-and-white filter, shadows, brightness, contrast, and saturation, plus the ability to rotate, resize, and reorder images.
• Elegant, ready-made layouts: You should be able to choose from a wide range of photo layouts that can suit any number of photos in a variety of orientations. You should never feel the need to create your own design.
• Flexibility in design: For more-ambitious people, a good photo-book service allows you to design a layout from scratch.
• Print quality that’s true to the source files: The photo book shouldn’t make your high-resolution photos look blurry, grainy, or oversaturated. It should capture the resolution and colors as accurately as possible, even if you mostly use photos from Instagram.
• Variety of cover and binding options: The cover is the first thing people see when they look at a photo book. We preferred services with a range of options that look nice and can withstand years of handling.
• High-quality paper choices: We looked for paper that’s durable, of high quality, and resistant to tearing. Photo-book services should offer a variety of paper types, such as gloss, semigloss, and pearlescent.
• Easy to reprint and revisit: Unlike traditional, scrapbook-like photo albums, modern photo books can be reproduced at any time. Therefore, the service you use should save your photos, layouts, and projects so you can return to print or edit them whenever you want.
• Flexible upload options: A good service should at least be able to receive photos from your computer, as well as from online platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
• Layflat spreads: These spreads allow you to depict one picture across two pages without the center crease of a traditional bound book. Though this sounds fancy, it’s a common offering from photo-book services, and it is a worthwhile upgrade in photography or wedding books. We didn’t make this option a requirement when testing for our top pick and budget pick, but we gave extra points if a service offered it. We required flush-mount layflats when testing for our upgrade pick.


Printing expert Taylor McAtee compares the print quality of each of our albums, examining color vibrancy and accuracy, image resolution, and binding and paper quality. Erin Roberts for NYT Wirecutter

To test these services, we created similarly sized albums and selected similar cover and paper materials. We used both high-resolution DSLR shots taken by professional photographers and iPhone snapshots. We specifically selected images that can be harder to print, in order to see how each service performed when tasked with HDR (high dynamic range) images, tricky colors, black-and-white photos, and even dimly lit phone photos.

We laid out each book in the same order, using the service’s most basic, white template. We also used each service’s default font for captions, sticking with whichever typeface and size were assigned to the theme we chose. All of the companies allow you to change fonts, but that can be a hassle, and we decided the default font would look nice enough.

Over the years and during several rounds of testing, we’ve asked printing expert Taylor McAtee to compare and contrast print and page quality. We’ve asked friends who enjoy making family photo albums to examine the photo books, and they’ve provided helpful, real-world observations, including which paper finish might hold up the best in a 5-year-old’s grubby hands.

Top pick: Mixbook


Erin Roberts for NYT Wirecutter

Top pick

Mixbook’s intuitive, simple-to-use design software, vibrant and accurate colors, and modern layouts make it our pick for the best photo-book service for most occasions. Among the 23 books we tested in this category, Mixbook had some of the most vibrant color pages, and the colors most closely matched those in our original photographs. This is also one of the few services offering a dedicated mobile app for iPhone owners, in case you prefer designing from your phone. And you can invite collaborators to help with or review a project before it goes to print.

Its versatile image-uploading options make it easy to find the photos you want. If most of your iPhone photos end up trapped inside your phone (as ours do), you’ll likely find that adding mobile images directly to Mixbook makes the design process much more efficient.

Using a QR code on your computer screen, Mixbook guides you in selecting and loading pictures from your phone. After you refresh your screen, voilà — your iPhone snaps are now available for you to add to your current project. You can also upload directly from a computer, your social media sites (Facebook and Instagram), and photo-storage accounts (Google and SmugMug).

Its book-building software is the easiest to use. The Auto-Create option feels like magic: After you’ve uploaded your images, a single click of a button builds your book using “only the best images.” This is an efficient way to get a solid first draft, and it’s easy to customize from that point.

Unlike some of its competitors, Mixbook offers a swap button to swiftly replace one image for another. You can quickly change layouts, too: The software displays recommended layouts using your images and may be filtered by number of images per design.

It offers helpful tips to make sure you never feel lost. Mixbook’s guidance boxes were the most helpful resource of any service we tested. These pop-ups, which you can close as needed, provide tips as you start to build a book.

Its photo-editing tools are simple and efficient. These tools include the same basic options offered by most other services: brightness, saturation, contrast, and opacity. You can crop and zoom in and out of photos easily, though the free-rotation tool was tricky (to fix your horizon lines, you have to click and hold down the arrow in the circle).

Six filters can give your printed photos an Instagram feel; you can also play with shadows and borders or even make a heart-shaped image. Text was easy to insert, and Mixbook offers a plethora of font choices and controls.

We tested how the photo books printed a variety of images, from high-resolution DSLR shots to poorly lit smartphone snaps. Erin Roberts for NYT Wirecutter

Thoughtful little touches make a big difference. When you’re pulling from an available image library in Mixbook, you simply have to hover over a photo to make it bigger. We really liked this feature because it can be tough to choose your next image based on a tiny thumbnail. (When we used other services, we sometimes had to add the actual photo simply to determine whether it was the one we’d intended to include in the first place.)

It offers more templates than the competition. Each well-designed template can be kept as is or modified.

Mixbook offers 174 “everyday” album templates, from the simple Minimal White design (which we chose) to birthday, wedding, and seasonal themes. Plus, the themed layouts show actual photo examples, a truly useful feature when envisioning what you’ll create.

Photo reproductions are vibrant and color-accurate. As we found in previous testing, our 20-page, 11-by-8.5-inch Mixbook photo book was one of the most vibrant books we created, and its colors most closely matched the colors in our original photographs.

Mixbook did a good job of correcting a tricky photo of me about to board a helicopter for the first time: I’m a too-dark, shadowy subject in front of the sunny landing platform where a helicopter and pilot wait. Mixbook struck a better balance of the contrast, picking up more detail in my face while retaining the vibrant background colors.

We reached out to Mixbook to ask about its color-correction practices. CEO and co-founder Andrew Laffoon confirmed that Mixbook automatically applies “very minimal” autocorrection and that the feature can’t be turned off.

Mixbook uses high-quality paper. In our most recent round of testing in this category, Mixbook’s simplest album option came with the second-thickest pages — akin to the pages of a coffee-table book. The pages felt durable enough to stand up to the grubby paws of a small child, and they had enough sheen that we also thought they could endure a small mess and be wiped clean.

Its pricing is on a par with that of competitors. Mixbook albums cost about as much as or slightly more than other comparable albums in this category. But it’s always worth seeking out a discount, since the service usually offers an active 50%-off coupon.

If you don’t see a coupon at checkout, you can always make the book and then wait to purchase it until you can get a discount. This is especially handy if you opt for upgrades, like layflat pages, which can nearly double the price of an album.

Mixbook doesn’t spam you with email ads. Unlike Snapfish, which took our order as an invitation to send daily promotional emails, Mixbook didn’t automatically inundate our inboxes with promos after we created an account. We actually had to go into account settings to sign up for Mixbook’s email offers (and you can unsubscribe just as easily).

Flaws but not dealbreakers

Other photo-book services offer more photo-editing tools. We worked with Mixbook’s available brightness, saturation, and contrast sliders to boost a cloudy-day photo. Though the results looked a bit better onscreen, the printed version still appeared dark.

You could also use an external image-editing program, but we often found we needed to make another small tweak or two after we placed an image on the page; editing that image elsewhere and then reimporting it to use in our design felt like a time-consuming chore. A more-robust editing suite within Mixbook’s interface would mean we could make any necessary edits seamlessly while creating a photo book.

Upgrade pick: Milk Books


Erin Roberts for NYT Wirecutter

Upgrade pick

An heirloom-quality luxury album

Milk Books

If you can splurge on an album that’s designed to last a lifetime, Milk Books makes a truly beautiful keepsake. The design tools are simple, and the print quality is top-notch.

If your budget allows, Milk Books offers a truly beautiful photo album meant to withstand the test of time. The Premium Leather Photo Album we created stood out from the competition in this round of testing six upscale photo book services. The layflat, flush-mount, soft leather cover was well crafted, and the thick and sturdy pages displayed our test images accurately. The aesthetic is modern and clean, and the design editor is easy to use, with lots of helpful how-to videos.

It’s a premium product made with heirloom-quality materials. For this category of luxury albums, we looked for high-quality construction and components like real leather covers and flush-mount layflat bindings — a combo that you cannot get from our top pick, Mixbook. Milk Books offers a limited but focused assortment of photo books, services, and albums with a cool, minimal look. We were impressed by how accurate images looked: Milk Books uses six-color liquid-ink digital printing technology on archival, acid-free paper that shouldn’t color with age. The pages were the thickest of those we tested, and they felt like they could withstand some turning and even a dirty fingerprint or two.

The design editor is easy to use, with live chat. Milk Books guides users through the creation process with a series of helpful videos. We also found the live-chat option useful, despite not always being immediately available, since the company is based in New Zealand. The AI assistant suggested relevant support articles, and customer service followed up via email the next business day.

Drag-and-drop editing makes moving images quick, and the undo and redo buttons help you to quickly consider changes. Layouts are clean and limited enough to keep the look and feel of the design consistent.

Milk Books uses six-color liquid-ink digital printing technology on archival, acid-free paper that shouldn’t color with age. Erin Roberts for NYT Wirecutter

The mobile site works well, and the digital flipbook is cool. More than the competition, Milk Books feels focused on modern methods of album making. The mobile site is just as intuitive as the desktop version, and Milk Books also offers Mac users a desktop extension that works within the Photos app to build books within that software. Milk Books creates a digital flipbook alongside your physical album; it can be shared before you order, if you’re looking for feedback, or after the fact.

Milk Books has a 100% satisfaction guarantee. Milk Books offers a replacement guarantee if it is at fault for any defect, as well as a fairly uncommon offer to reprint any product at 50% off, even if the mistake is the customer’s fault (such as a spelling error).

Flaws but not dealbreakers

The design software doesn’t include photo-editing tools. It’s irksome and time-consuming to have to leave the design editor to make even the simplest changes to a photo, and then to have to reimport the updated image before continuing with your project. Milk Books also offers no photo correction services, so you’ll want to triple-check every page before confirming your order.

**We wish it offered design services. **Milk Books has the highest price point of any photo album service we tested, so we were surprised to find it didn’t offer any sort of design services, like those offered by competitor Artifact Uprising. The option to consult a design pro would be a welcome addition when creating such an important and expensive keepsake. (Another high-end photo album service we tested notes on its site that the average album-creation time is two to four hours — a measurement I found to be true, even as a professional photographer and experienced album creator making the same test album over and over again.)

The cover text lacked the premium look of true debossing. Although Milk Books uses the term “debossed” within its design-editing software, cover text is printed digitally and set with ultraviolet lights. The effect is a smooth print onto the leather in a variety of colors, depending upon the cover material. It’s a different appearance altogether than some of the albums we created that featured true debossed lettering, which sinks into the leather cover and has an alluring metallic shine.

It doesn’t come with a storage box. Unlike all of the competition in this category, the album we ordered from Milk Books did not come with a storage box. The company does sell one for an additional $65.

Budget pick: VistaPrint


Erin Roberts for NYT Wirecutter

Budget pick

For a basic photo book at a lower price than our top pick, VistaPrint got the job done, even if the cover photo was a little oversaturated and the design process wasn’t quite as smooth.

It lacks our top pick’s cute design templates. When you start creating your VistaPrint photo book, you can select from only seven size options, and it doesn’t offer any design templates to start from. You can add some 1990s clip art or masks within the editor, but this option is not nearly as attractive or easy as selecting from one of the hundreds of templates that Mixbook offers.

Adding photos is simple yet limited. Unlike our top pick, VistaPrint allows uploads only from your computer, and it doesn’t allow for HEIC files, which is how iPhones and iPads save images by default.

You can change your device’s camera settings to shoot JPEG, and it’s not difficult to convert HEIC files to JPEG after the fact, but it is one more hurdle that can get in the way when you’re itching to start designing. You could opt to create a book via VistaPrint’s mobile site, which works fine with HEIC files, but that platform isn’t as easy to use as the desktop site.

VistaPrint wasn’t quite as easy to use, and the cover was a tad oversaturated. But inside, the color accuracy and page quality were nearly as good as our top pick’s. Erin Roberts for NYT Wirecutter

There are even fewer photo-editing tools, but the print quality was nearly perfect. VistaPrint’s editor offers even fewer photo-editing tools than our top pick, and it doesn’t offer a way to fix an imperfect horizon line — a photographer’s pet peeve. By default, VistaPrint will “enhance” all photos automatically; a pop-up window bears this warning as you begin to create your photo book.

We left the auto-enhancement option on, and the results were as good as our top pick’s, with accurate color reproduction and impressive corrections on our tricky test images. Only the cover image appeared oversaturated, and VistaPrint had two tries at this because the first copy arrived with a slight wrinkle in the corner of the cover.

Customer service is responsive, too. VistaPrint was responsive to our complaint; it requested images of the damage and then sent us a new copy for free. The new book arrived in just a few days. The cover was unwrinkled but still a bit oversaturated, which made skin tones appear too pink.

**It has a mobile website but no mobile app. **Though VistaPrint doesn’t offer a dedicated app, the mobile version of the website is okay. If you prefer designing your photo book through an app, check out Mixbook, our top pick.

It’s a great book and a good value. If you just need a simple book, perhaps at a price that makes multiple copies possible, VistaPrint is a solid option. In terms of color accuracy and page quality, the final result was a very close second to that of our top pick; there were just a few flaws we noticed during the creation process and a not-quite-color-accurate cover.

Tips for making your best photo book

Printing expert Taylor McAtee said you should trust the experts at whichever photo-book service you choose. “Just pick the photos you like,” McAtee said. Because your home computer likely doesn’t have a color-calibrated monitor, the onscreen edits you make could look much different when images are printed, he explained.

McAtee also offered two additional tips for selecting photos to include in a printed book:

• Avoid washed-out, intentionally very bright (aka high-key) images; they often don’t look as good in print as they might on a glowing digital screen.
• Don’t apply Instagram filters or use other editing apps that may compress your iPhone files. Doing so can result in a low-resolution photo when the image is printed.

The competition

Though there is a lot we love about Artifact Uprising’s minimalist design aesthetic, we have been concerned by the color accuracy we observed in our past tests, as well as in our most recent round of testing premium photo album services. Artifact Uprising told us it employs its “own unique, custom color profile to Signature Layflat albums to produce a more saturated and high-contrast image for printing, which is intended for users who don’t heavily edit their photos.” While we understand that this vibrant look may appeal to some, we have found the effect to create unintentional color casts in our images; this can be especially problematic when it comes to re-creating accurate skin tones.

We tried out Printique’s Layflat Leather Photo Albums, but the leather cover looked wrinkly once we had it in hand, and the crowded layouts didn’t appear as attractive as those of the competition.

We were impressed by the large album we made using Zola, a popular online wedding planning resource. The pages were as thick as our top pick’s, and the image quality was in line as well. We didn’t like the layouts as much, however, and because they so heavily favored horizontal images, the end result didn’t feel as aesthetically pleasing.

Snapfish was about the same price as our top pick. But, as in past years, it delivered a book with dull and muted photos and some of the thinnest pages we saw in our testing. And following our order, Snapfish sent us the most promotional emails — at an annoying pace of about one every other day.

In past years, we found the photo book built with Pikto looked a lot like the results from our budget pick, VistaPrint, but the service cost a bit more, and its software was clunkier, with no swap button. It was also difficult to connect with its customer service: No one ever answered our calls during business hours, no chat help was available, and the back-and-forth email assistance we did receive was slow. In the most recent round of testing for our upgrade pick, a series of shipping delays prevented us from ever receiving the album.

Walmart Photo is a past budget pick, but the album we created for our most recent round of testing wasn’t as good as in previous years. The cover image was oversaturated, making skin tones appear pink and not true to life. Color accuracy was also off throughout the thin pages, appearing dull compared with that of the competition.

Though Shutterfly was previously a top pick, the last time we physically tested the service, the image quality was a letdown. We took a fresh look for this update, but we found that for the price (it’s about $10 more than our top pick), other photo-book services offered better editing tools.

For people who already use Google Photos, the Google Photos books are the path of least resistance. Although it’s a fast and brainless solution, the automated process allows for little control or creativity. Photos are autofilled in chronological order, and it’s a hassle to move images around if you’d like a different format. If all of your photos aren’t already stored with Google, that adds another step to the process. Layout and design options are limited, and it doesn’t have image-editing tools.

We also checked out Amazon Photos. As with the Google Photos option, with this one creation is a breeze, as long as you’re already using it to store your photos. The online software allows for slightly more control over image placement, but it doesn’t have image-editing tools or enough design options overall.

Apple also allows you to create a photo book right from Photos, using the Motif app. But just like the Google Photos and Amazon Photos options, this one is very specific to the platform, and you have very little control over design or photo editing.

We made two books with Blurb — one with its web-based software, Bookify, and another with its downloadable software, BookWright.

We were disappointed with the options available in Bookify. It had very few layouts, and they had too much white space for our liking. We also experienced major glitches with captions.

BookWright, meanwhile, offers a huge range of design options, including layouts and fonts, with very little glitching. It reminded us a great deal of Photoshop or InDesign, so if you’ve used those programs before, you may be familiar with the added controls. We also liked that Blurb allows you to upload a PDF to create your book, and that it offers plug-ins for Adobe InDesign and Lightroom. BookWright could be a good choice for amateur photographers or anyone looking to print a series of books.

Nations Photo Lab, our pick for the best online photo-printing service, continues to disappoint us with photo book software that offers almost no photo editing and only basic layouts, at a higher price than our top pick. We tried their highest-quality album offering for our most recent round of testing, and though it was the least expensive in this category — in fact, a third of the price of our upgrade pick — the images were dark overall, and the cover quality could not compare.

This article was edited by Ben Keough and Erica Ogg.