Top 5 Template Sites for Designing Online Customized Photo Books

Creating stunning, well-made books for photography can be challenging. Thankfully, there are a number of great websites that offer customizable templates for photo books that can get you kicked off in the right direction.

What is a photo book?

Photo books aren’t just for families to upload pictures and create vacation or wedding books. They are useful for:

  • Comic books
  • Professional portfolio
  • Cook books
  • Catalogs
  • How-to guides
  • Yearbooks
  • Children’s books

The usefulness of the template for your needs varies by service, so we looked into 5 great online templates for custom photo books.

My Publisher

This company is not as versatile as some others, with only a few different templates. What My Publisher seems to do best is professional portfolios. Like some other companies, you can create lay-flat pages that move almost seamlessly from one page to the next. One unique feature that makes their portfolio options stand out is their slip cover option. Instead of just having a leather-bound book, you can also have a matching leather-bound cover to carry it in. A lay-flat book starts at $45 for hard cover, and that’s without the slip cover.

The one major pitfall to this online company is that you have to download their publisher to create your book.

Memory Book Company

If you are looking for specialty yearbook publishers, Memorybook Publishing offers a variety of templates for cover design, page layout, and binding. The online creator allows anyone with access to the account to create and edit pages. That means an entire high school yearbook staff can have direct access to the pages as they create. The books aren’t just for schools either. They can be used for military books, camp books, or family ancestry.

One big bonus is that they offer a program that allows anyone to pay the company directly for the yearbook, without the need for a middle-man.

Mixbook

This company is one of the leading photo book publishers online, and with good reason. The quality of the books they produce is very high. The online template designer is easy to use. The variety of books that can be produced is expansive. They even offer a lay-flat book that seamlessly moves photos across pages, which makes it ideal for professional portfolios and how-to guides. Prices for the books are a little higher than most (the lay-flat books start around $89), but the quality and professionalism of the final product is immaculate.

The templates for the books include your choice of drag and drop cover design, text and photo integration, and more than 200 different template designs based on your needs. Mixbook is a surefire winner if you are looking for professional-looking final products.

Picaboo

This company has a wealth of unique templates for a variety of needs. The quality of the print is good, and the cost is a little more reasonable than higher end companies such as Mixbook. The templates for overall design available make this company ideal for professional portfolios, cookbooks, and catalogs. They offer a lay-flat book that prints up to 90 pages, but the photo does not seamlessly move from one page to the next like Mixbook does.

The only real pitfall to Picaboo is that they only offer 5 different text only pages.

Lulu

This company is known for allowing authors to self-publish the books. What a lot of people don’t know is that you can create beautiful photo books as well. The editor is easy to use, and the templates are good for children’s books and comic books. What makes Lulu great for these two genres is the ability to set a price and publish the book right from their website. That means no creating and finding a publisher. You create it and publish it yourself in just a few easy steps. As an added bonus, the more copies you purchase yourself, the more of a discount you get on the cost of the book.

Photo books aren’t just for families anymore. The template designs make them versatile and useful for everyone.