MyPublisher | Design your own Photo Book to be printed as a beautiful hardcover book!

I have used this service and commented here in the past. They gave me the chance to Beta Test the new software for Mac. I have used the iPhoto Plug-in before. This is a stand-alone program that allows you to create a book, using photos from any source including iPhoto.

Thanks for letting me participate in the beta of the Mac OS X Beta program. I did the survey but not sure if all comments will make it though. I’ll do a full review after the final release.
When adding pictures from an iPhoto Album it would be better if you could drag and drop the album and have it add the photos in that album in order. Or if when you select all photos in an album it drops them in the same order. You can much easier order pictures in iPhoto then on the add photo bar.
The only way to add them in a specific order is to drag them one by one.
I like the big picture view that lets you organize the photos. I like the unassigned feature too. But you can only multi-select and select many by stretching the mouse over. A shift-select would be good. In other words click one then shift click one further down the line selecting all in the middle.
When working in the page layout I like the double click to get to the image controls. That gives comfort and control over pictures as you work on layout.
There seems to be a bug in the image control window. I forgot to click done after editing a picture and then going to add another picture to that page. I went up dragged the new picture down and it worked but didn’t close the image control menu. Then I clicked done on the image control menu and it wouldn’t go away. I saved the book. Then I went to the next page, okay, but when I went to drag a picture down to the page the application crashed. I had to restart and good news the book opened to that page again.
The zoom in on text is cool, would be good to incorporate the spelling check feature of Mac OSX.
It would be nice to move composed pages around. In other words, when you go to the pages film strip view up top, you cannot drag and drop pages back and forth. You have to unload and reload pictures. Or am I missing something.
For example, the All pages view is nice to move pictures around the entire book, it would be good to be able to move pages too.
I moved a picture to a page that had a black background and the text didn’t change to white – so it didn’t show up.
When adding and deleting pictures from pages, moving them around there seemed to be some random placement of pictures at the top film strip. I lost track. But when I went from pages film strip to photos film strip (or whatever its called at the top) the pages were okay.
I changed the layout background from white to black and it ended up replacing a picture on the page. I also noticed that at these glitch/random events it leaves the picture up top. Actually it grabbed a picture from the next page, because when I tried to replace it back it replaced one on the next page. Maybe its trying to autofill but its acting strange. Now its locked in a picture and when I try and delete or correct it sticks, won’t let me delete. I’m quitting and restarting. Didn’t help.
I went back and did some reworking, not sure if pictures disappeared or not. I then ran into the same image control bug – window stuck. So I saved and quit and restarted.
You cannot seem to go back and get photos – well you can but when you do, any unused photos in the filmstrip disappear. I did go back to get more and when I went to the pages view it only had the 4 I added. Well I went to the organize page and it had put all the unused pictures on page 15, not sure what that means. There isn’t a page 15 yet.
I deleted all the empty pages and they went back to unassigned.

Login and upload went fine. More options here then with iPhoto plug-in. That is a bonus.
In the end, I think it is easier to use iPhoto’s book maker, except for these publishing options.

Categories: Photography, Software