A proper wedding album (not a fotobook)

[Isa]

Hello all,

My boyfriend recently proposed and of course I can't stop myself from starting to prepare the wedding, even though it is scheduled for next year and there is really still a lot of time ;)

Anyway, I would like to know where I can design and order a proper (hardcopy) wedding album online. I have seen that there are about two-hundred sites that allow to do so with fotobooks, but I want the real thing. A nice, big, heavy, good-quality wedding album, with real photos inside. Still, I am not prepared to pay a fortune and get it from a photographer.

Does anybody know a good site?

[WebLady]

There are so many different photo book and scrap booking options out there; what are you looking for exactly?

You can get wire bound, book bound or ring bound albums with matted inserts and leather covers if you want. Although you maybe be able to find them online and put them together yourself, they are still not cheap.

[FedererPhoto]

Your photographer should be able to help you, no?

www.queensberry.com (http://www.queensberry.com) does astounding work and is perhaps the type of album you are describing (big, heaving, good quality). It's where many good photographers get their work finished. Figure 1-2k for printing... but it really depends on how many sides and such.

http://www.finaoonline.com/ is a cheaper alternative to queensberry but still does a very good, high quality job. I think you could get in and out for under a thousand (again, depending)

http://www.whcc.com will do albums, but probably not of the quality you are looking for.

Quality is going to cost.. :-/ There is a reason photographers charge so much for them.

[KristinGriffin]

There are MANY quality album vendors out there, but equally as many will only work with a photographer, not direct to a client. Your wedding photographer should be able to provide you with a professional album, but anything of quality will be pricey - it's expensive and time consuming for the photographer as well... Leather-bound, flush mounted, inscribed albums are not cheap, but they are the family heirlooms that will last long after the flowers have wilted and the cake has been eaten....

Personally, I use Lustrecolor or PictoBooks, but I think you have to have an account with them. You could try Mpix.com, I believe you'll have to do all the designing yourself - there aren't templates. Otherwise ask around when you are interviewing for your wedding photographer. Perhaps you can find a package that includes an album at a price you can agree on.

[crystalinephoto]

Higher grade wedding albums are only available through your photographer, these companies work on a wholesale basis with photographers with a sales tax license only, this is in order to ensure only high quality photographs are used and so that the photographer can use them as a sales tool. Although we as photographers love what we do, we also do it to make money... just like you we have bills to pay and we need to eat too. Albums take a lot of time and effort to create and the price a photographer charges for them reflects how much time they put into them. I realize that not every bride has the larger budget to afford a luxurious album, but their are also options out there like books through snapfish, kodak sites etc. Otherwise I would look for a book that has an archival quality to it, which means putting your prints in the album will not harm them. I've seen some scrapbooking stores with some really neat albums, and even some offers online. However, your best bet would be to back to your photographer to see what you can get through them. Tell them what your budget is and see if they can work with you, or save up and treat yourself to a fabulous album for your anniversary. Often times we can creste something with less pages for less money or have less expensive options than what was offered in our packages.

[Isa]

At the end we got our wedding album from [sweetmemoryalbums.com]. They offer a service similar to all those photobook sites, i.e. choosing cover, uploading pictures, receiving album by post, but they do so for proper photo albums. We got a beautiful 12" x 12" flush mount album with 30 pages for just under 350$, including design, printing and delivery. The design is really nice and the quality of the album is excellent, especially considering that our photographer would have charged us 4 x times as much for what I think would have been pretty much the same product. :)