Ever since MyPublisher shut down last year, one of the most common questions we’ve gotten is: who will we use to make our family photo book now? For months we didn’t have a clear answer because we only make our annual “family yearbook” once the year is over. Now that 2018 has arrived, we finally added our 2017 album to the shelf and we’re very pleased with how it turned out.
We aren’t photo-printing experts, but after years of using MyPublisher (our first annual album was from 2011) we had grown used to their product and built a consistent stack of books. When they closed, a lot of readers were upset — we heard that directly and received dozens of recommendations for alternatives. The services that came up most often were Blurb, Mixbook, Artifact Uprising, and Shutterfly. Many readers recommended Blurb the most, with Mixbook close behind, while Shutterfly drew mixed opinions.
Based on reader suggestions and some hands-on exploration, we decided to try Blurb for our 2017 yearbook. I can’t directly compare it to every other option, only to our MyPublisher albums, but for anyone familiar with MyPublisher’s quality and varied layouts, Blurb is a close match and, in some respects, an improvement. This was an unpaid test—we ordered and paid for our book like everyone else and waited for delivery.
Size
One important detail for us was how the new book would fit on the shelf. Blurb’s Standard Landscape Photo Book spine is slightly shorter than the MyPublisher standard we used to order, which makes it stack naturally with our older albums. It’s also a bit narrower, but that difference is hardly noticeable when books are stored flat or upright. It might sound trivial, but maintaining a uniform stack of yearbooks has been part of the fun for our family, so finding a format that keeps that continuity matters.
Price
Our final Blurb book cost around $43. That’s about $5 less than what we typically paid for MyPublisher albums, though we did use fewer pages this year, so it’s not a perfect apples-to-apples comparison. Historically, a lot of the MyPublisher cost came from extra pages. We often used the 99-page maximum, which could become expensive without promotions. Blurb’s base pricing is lower, and although their discount codes felt slightly less generous than some MyPublisher promotions, the overall cost was still noticeably cheaper. In a direct comparison without discounts, Blurb’s pricing in our case would have been substantially lower than what MyPublisher charged for a larger book.
Layout & Software
Like MyPublisher, Blurb offers downloadable software for offline layout called BookWright. It’s simpler and faster than the old MyPublisher tool: importing photos and working in the app felt quicker. BookWright has fewer preset layouts out of the box, but you can create and save custom templates for repeated use. I also discovered after ordering that BookWright includes a “trim area” guide that helps prevent important content from being cut off during printing; I hadn’t enabled it on my first pass, which meant a couple of photos ended up a bit more tightly cropped than I preferred. Now that I know how to turn on those guides, future books will avoid that issue.
Quality
From a non-professional standpoint, the printed result met our expectations. I didn’t notice a meaningful difference between Blurb and our MyPublisher books. The spine felt a touch sharper, perhaps because our Blurb book had fewer pages, but the photo-wrapped cover, internal color reproduction, and overall sharpness were very good. BookWright warned that several iPhone photos were low resolution, yet to my eye those images still looked great in print. A photography pro examining every pixel might see differences, but for a family yearbook that will be handled, read, and enjoyed by kids and relatives, the prints look crisp and true to the originals. Our book contains over 400 photos and there wasn’t a single image we were unhappy with.
I’m likely leaving out small details, but overall I wanted to share a full report since so many of you asked. The main takeaway is that we can continue our Family Yearbook tradition with confidence. These books are meaningful to our family: the kids often pull them down to flip through photos, and receiving a new volume is always an exciting moment when we look through it together for the first time.
Thanks to everyone who suggested Blurb — your recommendations helped us keep this tradition alive. Happy yearbooking!
P.S. For context on why we prefer photo books over traditional albums: they can save significant space and money and make it easier to store and share memories.