Geek Essential

With my recent hard drive failure at home server, I realize how I have been neglecting the importance of backup. Luckily, most of the important files, especially photographs were scattered somewhat so that I was able to recover some of the more memorable events. This brought me to attention how much I have been relying on digital devices as a means to archive my photographs.

Well, with the lesson learned, I thought may be it is time to go low tech again and print the photos so that when this type of disaster comes, I have hard copy of the photo to fall back to. Redundancy, redundancy and more redundancy is a must!

Then another thought came to mind when deciding to print the photos. I realize that I didn’t have them organized for one thing, but how about make it bit more special by creating a photo-book of the different event photos, like … say of the family vacation that I’ve taken with all of my siblings two years ago.

I’ve researched a bit into to before because I was going to plan something for my wife, however, this became a perfect opportunity to test out different online photo-book options that I have from where I live in Toronto, Canada.

There were four photo management/print tool that I’ve tested which seemed nice enough. However, for my purpose, I’ve decided to go with blurb.com which has an excellent client program and user interface along with nice set of themes and templates that will suit my purpose.

There were others, such as Costco, Picasa, and Photo-book. Here’s a quick run down on why it was not suitable.

Picasa: Though it is nice photo organizing software along with integration of google map, blogger, etc. it does not have photo processing store that handles photo-books.

Costco: Though their price is competitive, their client software is bit awkward and though it has some templates for collage, it seemed to decrease the quality of the photo altogether when resizing it. So I didn’t like it. Their photo printing services is still one of the cheapest around.

Photo-books: This is one of the first companies in Canada that started this photo-book trend. However, their client seemed limited without much options to choose from. No captioning available and their price was bit more than the one from blurb.

Hence, my choice in blurb.com Canadian site. Maybe I’ll do another post to describe the experience and the quality of the product they send out.