Digital Home Thoughts: Making Photo Album Memories with ZoomAlbum

I'm one of those people who has three printers: an Epson inkjet for printing photos (and on CDs), a Canon inkjet multifunction for scanning, copying, and faxing, and a Panasonic laser printer for large print jobs. I like the instant satisfaction of getting physical output of my projects, and while I use online photo printing services regularly, I'm not giving up my inkjet printers anytime soon. So it was no surprise that I got excited by ZoomAlbum's: a "project in a pack" tool that allows you to create tiny photo booklets. I had to try this out!

The company sent me a few to check out, and my first project was for my mother-in-law. She recently had to put down one of her dogs due to illness, and I thought a little "tribute album" to the dog would be fitting. I sat down one afternoon a few weeks ago to put it all together. There are two different types of ZoomAlbum kits: one with solid-colour covers, and one with covers that you can print your own image on; each one is priced at $24.95 USD (making this product fairly expensive). I tested the solid-colour cover kit. The kits do not include any software; you download it from the ZoomAlbum website. That process was fast and painless, and within minutes I was using the software. It was very simple to use, although there were some strange user-interface quirks. Here are a few images to help illustrate the process:


Figure 1: The first step is to collect the images you want to use. You drag and drop each image onto the page at the bottom.


Figure 2: Next, you can choose between different types of borders for the images. There's, unfortunately, no option to have the image fill the page - even if you don't include a border or text, there's a thick white border around each image.


Figure 3: Because of the square aspect ratio of the pages, most images need to be cropped. The ZoomAlbum software made this step painless, allowing me to zoom in and out on the image, and move it around to get the perfect positioning. Perhaps the only way to improve this step would be to add basic red-eye reduction or other photo adjustments.


Figure 4: A final preview - everything looks good. Next it's time to print.


Figure 5: The final stage is a warning screen that reminds the user to set the printer up properly.

Once the image was printed onto the special ZoomAlbum page, things got a little more complicated. The instructions on the back of the page describing how to fold the sheet together to make the book make it look simple, but for me it was anything but. I'm not a genius when it comes to spatial geometrics, so I struggled with this part. I finally thought I had it close, but ended up asking my wife for help (she's better at this sort of thing). We were able to assemble the book, peel off the labels, and stick it to the cardboard cover. It was a bit difficult to align, but we got it on there. My second book project was a bit easier - I went to the instructions page and found a video. Strangely enough, the video seems to show a different method of folding than the back-of-page instructions do, and the video also is cut in such a way that some of the folds are skipped. I was able to figure it out finally, but I think the product would be massively easier to use if they'd include a slow-paced, fold by fold, easy to follow video inside the software application.

The ZoomAlbum book was a big hit with my mother-in-law (tears were flowing), and I can imagine many creative uses for a product like this (especially with kids). If you're reasonably talented at paper folding projects, I can heartily recommend ZoomAlbum. If you're all thumbs, it will likely be a frustrating process that you'll need help to complete - but if ZoomAlbum includes a video tutorial with every software download, it would be much easier. I'd also like to see them reduce the price, or offer more than two books in each package - right now their pricing is $12.50 USD per book, which is extremely expensive given the fact that what you're buying is just paper. For $25 I'd like to see five books in a pack, not two.

Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, his sometimes obedient dog, and he has no talent for origami.