Top pick
This service offers the best book-building experience, modern design options, color-accurate photo reproduction, great customer service, and a powerful app.
Mixbook has easy-to-use and intuitive design software, vibrant and accurate colors, and modern layouts that make it our pick for the best photo book service for most people. Among the 17 books we tested, Mixbook had some of the most vibrant color pages, and the colors most closely matched the colors in our original photographs. It’s also one of the few services that offers 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.
Versatile image-uploading options makes it easy to find the photos you want. If most of your iPhone photos end up trapped inside your phone (like 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 (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.” It’s 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 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.
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, since 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 just to determine if it was the one we’d meant 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 172 “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 in previous testing, our 20-page, 11-by-8.5-inch Mixbook photo book was one of the most vibrant among all of the books we created, and the colors most-closely matched those 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. Of the six books we created in our most recent round of testing, 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 promotional emails daily, Mixbook didn’t automatically inundate our inboxes with promos once 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 on screen, the printed version still appeared dark. Of course, you could use an external image-editing program, but we often found we needed to make another small tweak or two once we placed images 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.
