Printing My Wedding Album With VioVio – Part 1

Two years later with those wedding photos still gathering binary dust on my hard drive, I finally got the nudge I needed in the form of an email from VioVio, an online photo printing service, asking if I’d be interested in reviewing their product. They also provided a complimentary $50 discount certificate to use along with my review.

While I’ve used photo printing services such as Blurb in the past to print out sample portfolio books, I wondered how and where VioVio would fit in, in terms of use – either professional or personal.

I was looking forward to logging in and playing around VioVio but I certainly wasn’t looking forward to going through hundreds of unprocessed wedding photos as well as navigating any help guides they might have to learn how to use their product.

So I planned on reviewing VioVio in a two-part series based on the following criteria:

1. Overall look and feel
2. Ease of use and functionality
3. Processing time
4. Quality of final product

This initial review covers the first three items above. Once I receive my wedding album in a couple weeks, I’ll round up my VioVio review.

Overall look and feel

I don’t consider myself superficial but when it comes to software, I’m definitely all about the look-and-feel (having spent years in my previous life as an application developer). VioVio’s interface happens to be in my favorite color – green. It is clean, easy to move around, and also emits a “personal” feel about it; a feel that appealed more to home and personal photography projects rather than a professional portfolio I’d send to National Geographic.

But this was only based on judging by first impressions. Once my album arrives, I’ll know for sure.

Ease of use and functionality

I hate using online help. Not because I’m a know-it-all (far from it) but rather, I want an application to be intuitive enough to use so that their online help guide is rendered useless (sorry technical writers!). Once I set up an account, the process of starting a new project was super straightforward. I called my project, “The Åkerströms”, and soon enough, I was whisked away to an online VioVio designer where I could upload photos and start laying out my photo book.

Since each of my images was pretty large (roughly 12MB and higher), I ran into issues right away (specifically an IO error) when trying to upload them using their built-in uploader so I opted for their FTP uploader which allowed me to pull the images – over 200 unedited photos – into the system in a simpler way.

While I knew uploading all those photos (unedited since I didn’t have time to sit and edit every single one) via FTP would take awhile, I hoped for VioVio’s sake that once those images were pulled in, everything else would be smooth-sailing.

And it was.

Especially once I discovered their super nifty Auto-fill tool which allowed me to pick the template layout of my pages and just by clicking the Auto-fill tool, auto-populate all the pages without much intervention.

A definite plus and time-saver!

There were other tools there to help me rotate, crop, zoom in/out, add captions, reorder, and work with my layout in general. I also had to glance through each page one more time to make sure heads and body parts weren’t awkwardly cropped out of frame while auto-filling.

Once my pages were laid out, it was on to picking my front and back covers.

Processing time

Considering I live in Sweden, it usually takes weeks for packages to get to me. Sure, I could fork out $100-$200 bucks for faster shipping but when the product I order is usually a fraction of that cost, it makes no human sense to me.

So I was curious to see what options were available to me once my album was ready to be printed, what the shipping costs would be, and if the complimentary $50 discount certificate would even make a dent in my shopping cart.

Once I was done with my covers and ready to purchase the album, a couple available book sizes and bindings based on the layout I’d worked with were displayed. I opted for the 8.5 x8.5 in Imagewrap Hardcover for $48.99.

So I was left with $1.01 for shipping to Sweden.

Obviously, I knew I had to pitch in the difference and was stoked to find that they do offer a very reasonable International SuperSaver 4-8 Week Shipping for $9.99 alongside the other Express, Get-here-tomorrow, Bank-breaking type shipping options, so my final shipping cost was $8.98.

Score!

Quality of final product

Once the album arrives in 4-8 weeks, I’ll let you know in part 2 of this review along with some final thoughts.

Stay tuned.