Tools to Reflect on Your Trips

This entry is part 9 of 11 in the series Travel Tools & Tips for Planning, Scheduling, Recording & Commemorating Your Trips

I remember things visually. I’m a long-time scrapbooker and moved a decade ago to document our important memories digitally. So, in this post, I’ll show you what I think are the best tools for archiving or documenting your travels so you can remember and reflect on your trips too.

Shutterfly

After using several options for printing photo books, beginning in 2011, I have my favorites. But if you search for the best photo book options in 2022, you’ll see Shutterfly at the top of the list. This boggles my mind because every time I’ve used Shutterfly the image quality has been poor. I also notice from the latest reviews that creators do not like the updates to the platform for Shutterfly. But the creation of a photo book is a fairly large investment, and you should take the choice of creation tool seriously. Because of this, I decided to give it another try by using it for a smaller trip we took to Pismo Beach in 2020.

• Pros
  • It appears Shutterfly’s editor has changed to mimic similar editors but with some misses.
  • There’s a running tally at the top that I didn’t immediately notice, but shows the running balance of the cost of your book. Keep an eye on that!
  • I like that I can see the file name of the photo I’m adding to the page, and that file name persists throughout managing the pages.
  • Aligning photos and other elements on the page is visually very easy. Guidelines display when things are aligned properly. This is very helpful.
• Cons
  • One of the first things I noticed when I tried adding photos is that Shutterfly doesn’t support HEIC format images. HEIC is the latest image format Apple creates on its devices. There are conversion apps that will convert them to JPG for you, but that’s another step you have to do.
  • The next thing I found was that if you use a template, prepopulated locations where you drag your photos to appear. When I do this, I get warnings that the image is too close to the edge and won’t print correctly. But if I attempt to fix it, by clicking on the photo and dragging the edges, it doesn’t change the template spot. It only crops the photo. So I end up with a zoomed-in image with the same problem. I had to turn on Advanced Editing, which I found by accident in order to be able to change the positioning of the prepopulated template. But if it’s a space in the template, why does it exceed the print limits in the first place?
  • The interface borrows from similar tools. But Shutterfly has used the standard keyboard shortcut for duplicating something (ctrl + d) to instead mean Turn On/Off Advanced Editing. That’s how I found out what Advanced Editing was! This seems unnecessary. There should be no Advanced Editing mode; it should just be in Editing mode (with the advanced assumed) automatically with no toggle.
  • The font selection for the covers is tricky. Intermixed with the regular fonts are some that are metallic. If you choose one of these metallic fonts, the amount of your book will increase by at least $15. These should appear as a separate selection or at least have a $ indicator (or at least the M indicator like what’s done in the embellishments search panel) to let you know upfront that it will increase your costs.
  • Shutterfly has a left panel that contains the context-sensitive display so that if you change the selection, the display changes with your selection. But, in non-Advanced Editing mode, if you click on a text box on a page, the text panel overlays on top of the context-sensitive menu so you lose sight of the panel underneath. Also, the text box widget where you’ve clicked doesn’t indicate that you’ve clicked it. If you’re in Advanced Editing mode, the overlay of the text panel doesn’t happen until you double-click the text box. But at least you do have an indication on the text widget that it’s been selected. That panel should really be a separate modal that appears more closely to the text on the page.
    • And on the topic of the text panel widget (the one where the text displays on the page of the book), if you are in Advanced Editing mode and you click on the widget, it’s selected. But if you move the text box using your keyboard arrow keys, you can only hit the key once and then the text box becomes unselected. If you don’t want to move the box with your mouse (because the box is already aligned to something else), and you want to just reposition its location slightly using the arrow keys, you have to keep reselecting the box with your mouse. Painful!
    • When you add text to a page, Shutterfly puts the box where it thinks it should go, and, depending on your existing layout, it may not be clear where that is. You may have to randomly click around to find it.
  • Also related to the context-sensitive menu display, the options are layout, backgrounds, embellishments, and idea pages. There isn’t an option to view all the pages in the book at one time such that you can rearrange them.
  • There is an impressive number of embellishments; however, there’s no opportunity to upload your own embellishments.
    • There is also an odd thing that happens when you’re looking at embellishments. If you check one of the styles, depending on the one you checked, the other options become unavailable. If you want to see all of the travel options at one time, you can’t. I took a screenshot of this because it’s hard to explain in words. Note: most of the options are greyed out.
      
      
      

When I ordered the book I created for this review, Shutterfly happened to be running a special. (They and the other creation tools often run specials. Watch for them and order your book when a special is happening.) But, to give you an idea, this book’s total broke down like this, for a 20-page book:

Mixbook

I’m a big fan of Mixbook. I’ve been using it since 2014, and it’s never disappointed. I’ve created multiple photo books with fabulous success. Here are some of the pages from our Scotland 2019 book. These are from the Mixbook web application.

Mixbook has not changed a lot, but I feel compelled to use it now and review its most recent user experience.

• Pros
  • Mixbook supports HEIC image format, so no conversion is necessary.
  • It has a panel on the left that’s context-sensitive so that if you change the panel selection, the panel content changes too. And there’s a panel on the right for your theme that allows you to rearrange the pages.
  • When adding text to a page, Mixbook gives you a box that’s very visible and prompts you to move it where you want it to display.
• Cons
  • I cannot see the file name of my photos at any point in time.
  • There is no way to see the amount due for the book while you’re working on it. You have to add it to your cart in order to see it.
  • When you start the book, you choose the shape of the book, portrait or square. You can’t pick the size, however. And there doesn’t appear to be a way to change the default size until after it’s in your cart.
  • Borders of pictures can become problematic if you insert a photo without first inserting an image place in the template. When you have a photo without a place designated for it, borders are handled differently. So you have to add extra space for them. The default borders for the templates are also too wide for my liking. So I end up futzing with them to ensure they look right before ordering the book.

Now I went on to add eleven more pages. The above tally was for a 20-page book. But while I was adding my pages, and photos, and futzing with the borders, Mixbook introduced a better deal. So, the larger book — 31-pages — actually came in at slightly less than the 20-page book:

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