Has anyone ever bought the $79.95 Photo Album from the Disney site?

[slickpoetry]

Hi All,

I have NOT added Memory Maker to our October trip. We will only be at Disney for 3 days (and are doing one character breakfast, fwiw), so I didn't feel like we'd get enough pictures to justify the cost. (You can buy individual pictures for $15 each, so if you take less than 10 pictures overall its better to just buy them a la carte).

Today, I saw a product on the website that I might be interested in. It's the $79.95 photo album. Product description is as follows

Disney premium Photo Books let you bring your vacation memories to life!

Easy to personalize with photos and messages – you can upload your favorite photos and use photos from your Disney PhotoPass account.

A wide variety of themes, backgrounds and stickers available featuring your favorite Disney Characters and icons.

Personalize your cover and spine with text.

Choose one of nine padded or custom photo cover designs.

Pages stitched, not glued, for durability.

SO obviously (like everything else on Disney's website), there's just not enough information there for me to make a decision. I have the following questions:

1. How many pictures does this hold?
2. Are the pictures directly printed onto each page in the book, or are they normal prints that are inserted into album sleeves?
3. Do I need to pay $149 for the Memory Maker in order to buy the $80 album?
4. If I don't pay the $149, and still want the album, am I going to be charged $15 for each picture I put in the album? Or is it--as I am hoping--truly just $80 to have all my photo pass pictures put into an album?

Thanks in advance

 

[jon18uk]

I've not bought the book, only got the $15 download before.
But you won't need to pay for MemoryMaker and/or the download just to get the book. However the $15 download you then have the picture, you can upload to Facebook or get printed in a supermarket or order a photobook from elsewhere.
The $80 book has the photos set out how you want it, but you then only have the book. It won't be loose photos in sleeves, more like a pre-printed scrapbook.
Looking on the website you can get up to 60 pages with up to 4 photos per page, so it depends how much text etc you want and how you choose to lay things out but I expect you can get at least 60 photos in it then.

 

[Wendybird55]

I've made 3 Disney photo books and think they are a good value..

-you can use both photopass AND your own photos that you can upload. You can upload as many of your trip photos as you want. I like this because many times I prefer my photos to photopass and I can use the photopass photos I like all in one book.

-you have freedom to design the book anyway you want so you can put as many or as few photos as you want on each page. In one of my books I had 11photos of us with various characters on one page.

-You can crop the photos. They have a whole bunch of boarders and stickers you can add to the pages. You can also add quotes and descriptions.

Best yet, it's something you can easily put on a book shelf and look at whenever you want. I think it's a great remembrance of a special trip.

My favorite photopass items are the book and calendar. I think they are both great ways to get many of your photopass shots at a good price. I love the calendars because the following year I get to see and remember all the fun times we had from our last trip.

One year I pre-paid for the disc of all our photos and though I was able to add boarders and such and create different versions of each photo...the disc is sitting on a shelf and I never look at it, whereas I pull down the books from time to time to enjoy. Also, I feel when you preorder a photopass package you feel pressure to make sure you get lots of photpass shots. Sometimes you spend more time trying to get photos then enjoying your trip. And this year I don't like any of the photopass shots we had taken (we didn't get many). The biggest disappointment was from Villains Unleashed ...DS waited online over and hour to get a picture with Jafar and the photopass guy cut off the top of Jafars hat in every shot. Thank goodness my husband also took a picture as it was much better. Yet, I can still make a calendar and/or book on photopass with all the great shots we took on the trip.

 

[ktlm]

The books are my favorite Disney souvenir. We get one every Disney trip. We use a combination of photopass and our own pictures.For a 3 day trip, it shouldn't be a problem, but I will warn you that the $79 is for only a 20 page book and then you can add extra pages for an additional per page charge. For a week trip we always add several pages and our book always winds up being somewhere between $100 and $150. They do sometimes run specials on them on the website, so be sure and look for a code when you are making it. Actually, I would say start looking at the special offers immediately after your trip. I think the codes change about once a week or two. I know I missed a code once because I didn't get on the website to start the book until a couple of weeks after the trip and when I did it was the last day for the code and I didn't have time to get the book finished and use it.

 

[JaimeK]

I completely forgot about the photobook (even though I made one years ago)! This definitely seems like a good option for us. A mug, a book, one great download for a holiday card and I'll be set.

 

[Luvchefmic]

This is also new to me, so please be patient. I have used the good old photopass since it first came out got the CD, came with the license, printed out as needed.

It's been a few years since I did that and this is all so new, I am only going to MNSSHP so it will be useless to get the MM.

Now this photobook everyone is SURE that you won't have to pay for the upload or download of photos on top of that charge ?

Can anyone tell me the largest size photo you can have made for each page? I see someone said up to 4 photos per page BUT can you get a picture so large that it takes up the whole page ?

Thanks so very much

 

[ktlm]

This is also new to me, so please be patient. I have used the good old photopass since it first came out got the CD, came with the license, printed out as needed.

It's been a few years since I did that and this is all so new, I am only going to MNSSHP so it will be useless to get the MM.

Now this photobook everyone is SURE that you won't have to pay for the upload or download of photos on top of that charge ?

Can anyone tell me the largest size photo you can have made for each page? I see someone said up to 4 photos per page BUT can you get a picture so large that it takes up the whole page ?

Thanks so very much

With the old software they had a few years back, you could only do 4 on a page. Now, you can put as many as you can squeeze in. I have one page that has a collage of 12 pics in my most recent one. Now, if you put that many on a page some have to be really small and you won't have room for the fancy borders or the character etc. add ins. Basically, it will have you pick a style that has pre planned pages, but then you can go in and delete all the frames and add ins on that page and even change the background and then totally design your own page from scratch. That is what I do. I never use their pre-planned template, and I never even keep all the backgrounds and add ins from the same theme- I mix and match. If you add frames to the photos it does take a lot of space as cute as they are which will get you less to a page.

For a horizontal pic, you can do one that takes up pretty much an entire page. For a vertical pic, the largest you can get is about 1/2 a page. The last page is always a one sided left hand page. Our last book I had finished our trip up on the 2 sided page before it. A photopass guy had gotten a fantastic pic of DD holding her Duffy bear so on that last page I just put a cute frame around it and made it as big as I could on one side of the page and then I took a Cinderella add in (DD's favorite princess) and made it big enough to fill the other half. You really aren't limited in what you can do. The new software is so much better than what they used to have. They have a ton more background page choices and add in choices now too.

As far as the photos, it is the same as doing a mug, ornament or a calendar. You don't have to pay to include the photos in the product....but it isn't going to give you the photos anywhere outside the product either. You won't have any photos to download to your own computer and you don't get a photo CD or anything- you just get the physical book. Also if you want a 2nd copy of the book, you can purchase that at a reduced price.


I went back and looked and my last 4 books have ranged between $107.95 and $121.95 (44 pages in that one)