To discover which features are important in a photo book service, we’ve researched more than 50 companies and created 23 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 used them to directly compare the image quality of different albums.

When updating this guide, we’ve consulted several experts, including Taylor McAtee, printing expert and owner of Stretch and Staple, a print shop in Seattle. We also crowdsourced input from friends who enjoy making albums with their family photos.

If you want to create an album of your digital photos, a photo book service is absolutely the way to go. Today’s digital 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.

Digital photo books can be customized to fit any purpose, such as for a baby book, a family trip album, or even a school yearbook. They also make great gifts for grandparents and family. 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 layflat book, 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.

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 digital photo book.

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 a great time to finally click the albums you have 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.

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 is 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, digital 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 a worthwhile upgrade in photography or wedding books. We didn’t make this option a requirement, but we gave extra points if a service offered it.

To test these services, we made 20-page photo books using DSLR shots taken by professional photographers, as well as iPhone snaps taken during my honeymoon trip to Tahiti. We specifically selected images that can be harder to print to see how each service performed when tasked with HDR (high dynamic range) images, tricky colors, black-and-white photos, and even dimly lit iPhone snapshots.

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. For each book, we also used the default cover and paper options (which are the cheapest or second-cheapest available).

Over the years and 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, such as which paper finish might hold up best in the grubby hands of a 5-year-old.

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. It is one of the few services that offers a dedicated mobile app 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 138 “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.

For a basic photo book at a lower price than our top pick, VistaPrint gets 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 only select from seven size options, and it doesn’t have any design templates to start from. You can add some 1990s clip art or masks within the editor, but that’s not nearly as attractive or easy as selecting from one of the hundreds of templates Mixbook offers.

Adding photos is easy, yet limited. Unlike our top pick, VistaPrint only allows uploads from your computer and 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.

Photo-editing tools are few, but 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, 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, since 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’s a great book and good value. If you just need a simple book, perhaps at a price that makes multiple copies possible, VistaPrint is a solid option. The final result was a very close second to our top pick in terms of color accuracy and page quality, with just a few flaws noticed during the creation process and a not-quite color-accurate cover.

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, explaining that because your home computer likely doesn’t have a color-calibrated monitor, the on-screen edits you make could look much different when printed.

He also offered two additional tips for selecting photos for a printed book: Avoid washed-out, intentionally very bright (aka high-key) images, which often don’t look as good in print as they might on a glowing digital screen. And don’t apply Instagram filters or use other editing apps that may compress your iPhone files, since doing so can result in a low-resolution photo when it’s printed.

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

The photo book we 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.

Walmart Photo is a past budget pick, but the album we created this year 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 the competition.

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

Though we love the minimalist look of Artifact Uprising’s designs, the books we ordered were both oversaturated. We tested the Hardcover Photo Book and the Photo-Wrapped Hardcover Book, the two most-expensive options we tested. In each book our photos were oversaturated, but especially so for the Photo-Wrapped Hardcover Book. This made my skin look especially reddish-pink in many photos, as though I had a significant sunburn throughout my trip (I didn’t). While turning up the vibrancy can make an image really pop, the downside can be inaccurate skin tones.

Google Photo’s photo books are the path of least resistance for people who already use Google Photos. 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 in 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 option, 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 Photo and Amazon Photo, this option 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 more expensive price than our top pick.

This article was edited by Ben Keough and Erica Ogg.