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Ordering photo books #1
John Krumm's picture
by John Krumm
January 13, 2012 - 10:56am

This probably counts as a “silly” question, but I couldn't find the answer on Apple's site. I teach middle school photography, and this winter thought I'd offer a small “photo book creation” class. So far so good. We are using Aperture. It's a “learn by doing” class for me. We have set up an Apple ID with the school credit card for ordering. My question is, does Apple keep the books online so that we can email links to parents and they can order extra copies themselves? I know that Blurb and Mypublisher do this. Thanks.

PhotoJoseph's picture
by PhotoJoseph
January 13, 2012 - 11:08am

John,

Actually, they don’t. Kind of silly, really. You have to re-upload for every order.

However you can create a PDF of the book, and use that to order elsewhere. But at that point you’re probably best off creating a custom layout for whatever publisher you’re going to use (i.e. Blurb, which I’ve heard good things about).

Does Blurb have Aperture templates you can download? It might… worth checking, for sure.

@PhotoJoseph
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Thomas Emmerich's picture
by Thomas Emmerich
January 13, 2012 - 12:58pm

Joseph,

I seriously looked into using Blurb to make a photo book for my niece. They have some really nice paper options. I wanted to do what you suggest and make the book in Aperture and just upload to Blurb to print. But after reading their help articles I discovered it’s not so easy.

Their system expects a particular type of PDF file as created by Adobe Distiller. All of their book from PDF instructions revolve around Adobe products. I ran into this problem a couple of years ago when I made a book using Apple Pages and saved it as a PDF to print at Lulu.com. Lulu wouldn’t accept the OS X created PDF. Luckily I have Acrobat Distiller on my work PC and I basically opened it and re-saved it so it looks like it was created by Distiller. They accepted that. Can’t figure out what value Distiller added to that PDF file but it worked. (If Distiller can fix a MacOS X PDF, why don’t they just do it for you on their end?)

To get around that PDF limitation this time I planned to make my book in Aperture and use the Print PDF menu to save each page as a JPG and import that into Booksmart (Blurbs bookmaking software). The reason I would go though this trouble is that Aperture is extremely flexible in letting you edit/create custom layouts and Booksmart, like iPhoto, is rigid only letting you use canned templates. I made my book in Aperture and then just decided to order it from Apple rather than mess with Booksmart. Since I wanted to ship to two addresses, I had to upload it twice. Apple really needs to make this experience better. Aperture 4 anyone?

It seems if you want a highly flexible tool to make books you either can use Aperture and order from Apple or use an Adobe product to make a “proper” PDF. Problem is those Adobe products are overpriced. Another advantage to Aperture is if you want to fix something in an image you’ve placed in an Aperture book you can just double-click and you have all the usual Aperture tools to work with right there in the book tool.

If using a canned template is good enough, the Booksmart SW is perfectly fine and Blurb has some fabulous book materials (based on my research rather than experience. I never actually ordered one from them).

Not sure if any of this info will help John but the price is right.

Tom

Thomas

PhotoJoseph's picture
by PhotoJoseph
January 14, 2012 - 3:56am

Thomas,

Thanks for that very valuable feedback. I wasn’t aware of the challenges working with Blur. Darn.

I’m going to tweet a question asking for best third-party book vendors to use with Aperture, and see what the twitterverse has to say. Stay tuned.

@PhotoJoseph
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Chris Hoch's picture
by Chris Hoch
January 14, 2012 - 4:02am

If you want the best that money can buy then my “virtual” hat that I am throwing in to the ring has to be Graphistudio Although they are specialist in wedding albums,you can use their expensive wedding albums for other events.

They have an aperture plugin which you can download here http://www.graphistudio.com/aperture/

Like i mentioned you will pay a fair amount for these books but if you watch the process of how these books are made then you will see why they are worth it.

Chris

Rolf Schmolling's picture
by Rolf Schmolling
January 14, 2012 - 5:15am

Hi,
went the way Tom suggested and it worked very well (Aperture, print to pdf BUT converted to JPEGs which I imported into Blurb.) I followed the very good advice Robert Boyer http://photo.rwboyer.com offered in his ebook on the topic. Still have to write a full review/report in detail my experiences with this Aperture/Blurb-combo and will in the near future. Anyway check out this:

http://photo.rwboyer.com/2010/08/15/aperture-book-tool/

Regards,

Rolf

PhotoJoseph's picture
by PhotoJoseph
January 14, 2012 - 5:25am

Thanks guys… keep ‘em coming!

Twitter user @johnwphoto said: “Yes, I am building books in Aperture and exporting to JPG via OSX and uploading JPGs to album company.”

So that seems to be a popular option.

@PhotoJoseph
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Kathryn W.'s picture
by Kathryn W.
January 14, 2012 - 10:35am

I’m curious as to why people are choosing not to use Apple to print their books. I gather that Apple templates are superior (maybe more user friendly?) than say, Blurb but wondered what about the other book companies make them the preferred printer.

I gather that when you export your pages into a PDF, the images are transformed into JPGs. Isn’t that getting further away from the bigger, better RAW images (assuming the originals are in that format)? If you have your book printed by Apple, are they working from the RAW or is it exported (and compressed into) a JPG as well? Is there any way to print from the RAW images or are they too huge for these book producers?

Kathryn

PhotoJoseph's picture
by PhotoJoseph
January 14, 2012 - 10:55am

Kathryn,

This discussion started because when you buy a book from Apple, the file isn’t saved for future orders. The originator of this thread is working with students and wants the parents to be able to log on and order additional copies of the books. Apple doesn’t do that. Blurb does. Shame, I know.

You can’t print from RAW. RAW isn’t even a photo; it’s a bunch of (raw) data. Aperture converts that data to an image on screen, which when printed, is sent to the printer as a PDF file. If you “print” a book to PDF, then export those pages as high quality JPGs, you’re going to have virtually the same quality, and certainly no difference you could spot in a print.

@PhotoJoseph
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