I finally ordered and received my second Viovio book! I ordered it on June 16th and received it on July 2nd. I chose the very slowest shipping option because it was only $1.99. The book shipped on June 25th. Make sure you order your book a few weeks ahead of time because they are slooooooooow. So, if you have a last minute album you need printed, you might want to try Shutterfly. They do offer A LOT of different shipping options, but their production time is longer than Shutterfly.

This is my second Viovio book. This time I decided to give their 10×10″ book a try. I LOVE this size! I’ve always thought 8×8″ books were too small and 12×12″ books don’t even fit on my bookshelf. I think the 10×10″ size is just PERFECT! I can read all the text just fine and detail that got lost on a 8×8 is more visible on the 10×10.

PRINT QUALITY: In comparison to all the other photo books I have ordered, Viovio’s printing is the best. The colors are great and I didn’t have the same issues with dark prints or grainy photos. To read more about my opinion on Viovio’s quality vs. other companies, click here. I do have to say that even though the print quality is the best among the photo books I’ve ordered, it is not as perfect as the photo processed prints I’ve received from Costco when I had individual pages printed. I can tell the difference between the pages printed on cardstock (like my photo book) and pages that were photo processed on photo paper. I used my templates from this tutorial and had nothing important cut off. Nothing was lost in the binding, but the pages don’t lay really flat so if you have text on that inside edge, take that into account.

Pictures from the inside…

COVER: I am REALLY hoping that Viovio will soon offer a custom casewrap cover on the 10×10″ book. I would love to be able to customize the cover more. I think this is my ONLY complaint about my book. I would like to be able to tell which book I’m picking up off the shelf by reading the spine. The cover is nice though, just not the type of cover I’d prefer. Wanting the bigger size outweighs the desire for the photo cover, so I’ll stick with this size rather than going back to the 8×8″. I have emailed some of their customer service reps about the cover. I was told that at the moment they do not have a printer large enough to print custom photo casewrap covers on the 10×10″ and 12×12″ books… HOWEVER, they said they are hoping to get a larger printer sometime in the future in order to offer the casewrap covers on the larger books. I’m crossing my fingers they’ll get a new printer by this time next year when I print my 2009 album. Oh, the logo on the back of my 8.5×8.5″ book wasn’t too bad, but the one that was embossed on the back of my 10×10″ is kinda ugly. Next time I might pay extra to not have that logo on the back.

See…. ugly logo… lol

BINDING: Looks great! I can tell it’s going to last.

PRICE: Phenomenal!! Seriously. A 10×10″ book with 62 pages for only $41.78 (including shipping). That’s a fantastic price!

I am so happy to have another album printed! Even though I’ve seen all these pages dozens of times before on my computer screen, it is so FUN to have them in front of me in a tangible book! I spent like an hour flipping through the pages and reading all the journaling. If you haven’t printed before, or haven’t done it lately, DO IT!

Viovio Part I - Resizing your layouts

Viovio Part II - Uploading Your Pages

Viovio Part III - Creating your book and ordering

Okie dokie! Now we’re ready to create our Viovio book. Once your pages are prepared and uploaded, we can get to the good part.

When viewing your gallery, click on the second icon in the upper right corner to start creating your book.

On the first part of the bookmaking process, you can select your cover image on the right. You will actually have the opportunity to change the cover image later on in the process (or upload a new cover). If you uploaded your cover image with your book, then choose that image from the pulldown menu now. I did not choose to print the cover image on the inside of the book because I specially designed an image *just* for the cover and it was not one of my LOs.

*NOTE: the covers vary for each book. If you’re doing the 8.5×8.5″ book, you can do a full custom casewrap cover. (snag a template for that here). The 10×10 prints a small 3.5×3.5″ image on the cover. The 12×12 has a die cut window and your cover image will be printed on the first page of your book and will show through that window.

If you’re doing ANY of the square scrapbooks, select ‘12″ Master Square’ from the first pulldown menu. You won’t pick your size for the square books until the end of this process. Make sure your options include: 1 image per page, Full Bleed, No Captions, and DO NOT select Auto Crop.

Click NEXT and the bookmaker will generate your book. This will take a few minutes.

It will then take you to a page where you can preview your book. You can flip through the pages to make sure it created your book the way you wanted it. It automatically put text on my cover, but you’ll be able to remove that in the next step. If your book looks good, click “Create Cover Next.” Now, the 10×10 and 12×12 do not offer a full wrap photo cover, but you will still need to do some editing under the “Full Wrap Cover” tab. If you see text on your cover, remove the text under the “Full Wrap Cover” tab. Just click on the title/author/spine and erase the text in the box. Then click “Update Cover” near the bottom of the page and the text should go away.

I am doing a 10×10 book, so I selected the “Embossed Material Cover” tab at the top. This is for the 10×10. If you’re doing a 12×12, select “Die-cut Cover.” Under the embossed cover tab, I selected the material I wanted for my cover (I picked Suede - Black). I did not choose to repeat my cover image inside the book. Then I clicked “Update Cover” and “Next.”

On the next page, generate a PDF preview and double check that your book looks good. Then if you’re ready to order, click “Buy Now” at the bottom of the page. Don’t worry that it says 12×12 book, you’ll be able to choose your size on the next page. Then on the next page, select your book size. I picked “Embossed Hardcover - Scale to 10×10.” If you want 12×12, select the “Die Cut Hardcover.” If you want the 8.5×8.5 then select “Casewrap Hardcover.”

Then add it to your cart and order when ready! I have to wait until payday to order mine, but I’ll be back to post pics and a review of my book when I get it.

Viovio Part I - Resizing your layouts

Viovio Part II - Uploading Your Pages

Viovio Part III - Creating your book and ordering

Remember way back when I started my Viovio book? Well, I’m finally getting around to finishing it! Sorry it took so long. Here’s step 2.

So, after your JPEGS are ready and in order, zip them up into zip files. This will make uploading to Viovio much easier. I divided them into about 50 mb zips. Once they’re zipped, go to Viovio and log in to your account. Then upload your zip files to a new gallery. When you upload, make sure you uncheck “Auto Rotate Images,” select “Don’t Resize Images,” and you might consider making your gallery “Private” instead of public. It will take quite a while to upload, but just go do something else in the meantime while you wait. My book had a little over 60 pages and was 220 mb and took 50 minutes to upload. Upload times will depend on your connection.

Viovio will automatically unzip your zip files. Cool, huh?

I highly recommend preparing your files so they are already in order BEFORE you upload your pages. To see how I named my files look at Part I. If you want to use ACDSee to rename your files, click here for a tutorial. If you don’t order your pages before you upload, you can rearrange them if you click on the Image Order icon in the upper right when viewing your gallery, but it is kinda confusing.

If you’re like me and uploaded your book, but then later added a few pages… you can add more pictures to your gallery. BUT it will put those new uploads at the end of your gallery rather than placing them where you might want them (I uploaded a page for the middle of my book). To reorder by name if you named them like I did, click the Image Order Icon, scroll to the bottom, and select “Reorder Gallery by - Image Name” and hit “Save Changes.”

Viovio Part I - Resizing your layouts

Viovio Part II - Uploading Your Pages

Viovio Part III - Creating your book and ordering

Alright, it seems enough of you are interested in getting help with Viovio. So, I’ll post as I go along… making a this a multi-part tutorial.

Viovio allows you to upload your 12×12 JPEG pages for any square photobook. So, if you have 12×12 pages and you want to print a 10×10 or 8.5×8.5, you CAN upload those 12×12’s and they will scale it down for you. The only problem with uploading your original pages is that you may have important things next to the edges that could get trimmed or lost in the gutter when your book is put together. So, you’re going to want to look through your pages and adjust any pages with text/titles/faces right against the edges. Another advantage of resizing is that Viovio only gives you 500 megs of free space, so if you size down for your books that aren’t 12×12, you won’t use as much of your Viovio disk space.

FULL BLEED: whenever you print books (or pages) the pages will get a little bit trimmed off each edge to make sure the image “bleeds” off the edge (so you won’t have any white edges and your image extends to the edges). Even the Costco photo lab does this, so this isn’t unique to photobooks.

GUTTER: When your pages are bound together, a little bit of one side of your page will get lost in the binding. My Viovio books lays pretty flat, so not a lot is lost, but you want to be sure your important stuff won’t get lost in the binding.

If some of your pages have nothing important near the edges, go ahead and upload those original full size JPEGs. I am super paranoid something important will get cut, so I open all my layered files and drag them to my Viovio template and resize/adjust.

You can download the Viovio templates I created here. I’m using the 10×10 template. It’s just a blank page with blue guides at 1/4 inch and at 3/8 inch from each edge. The 1/4 inch guide is for where they may actually CUT the pages. Only about 1/8 inch from each edge will get cut, but pages may shift so I put the potential “cut” guide at 1/4 inch. The next guide is the additional “danger” zone I include for the binding. Keep all text and important items out of the danger and cut zones. This will help ensure that you are happy with your book. But, if you use these templates and something gets trimmed, don’t blame me. I’m just trying to help. Just a note about the templates: you may notice that they are 12.25, 10.25, and 8.75 inches square. This is because they recommend uploading pages at this size because the pages will be trimmed to 12×12, 10×10, or 8.5×8.5… rather than 11.75×11.75, 9.75×9.75, and 7.75×7.75 like some other printers do. The Viovio 8×8 is actually 8.5×8.5, unlike other companies.

So, I open my original layered TIFF file and my Viovio template. I select everything in the layers palette by selecting the top layer, holding down SHIFT, the scrolling all the way to the bottom and clicking on the bottom layer. This will select all layers. Then I duplicate all these layers to my template file. Once everything is on the template, I hold down SHIFT and click on my background paper (and any other layers I want to bleed off the edge) on my canvas (hold down CTRL if you’re clicking on it in the layers palette) so that everything BUT the background is selected. Then I size my layers down so that everything is within the safe area. Then I’ll go resize the background paper so it fills the entire canvas because I want the background to bleed off the edge. Then I save this as a JPEG in my 2008 Viovio Book folder. Make sure you don’t overwrite your template file.

So, does that make sense?

Also, when I name my pages both as layered and JPEG files, I always name them like this: yyyy_mmdd_pagetitle (i.e. 2008_0106_alliesblessing.jpg). This way when I upload my files later to Viovio, they will automatically be put in chronological order. Otherwise, it will be a little harder to organize your book. You could also name them 001_name, 002_name, etc… but I like it to sort by date and since all my photos include the date info, I’ve always named my pages this way. I also like to name my files this way because I don’t always put dates on my layouts… so I’ll always know when the pictures were taken.

I know some people do not keep their layered files. If you don’t, then you can open any full size JPEG pages with stuff on the edges and duplicate it to your Viovio template and make sure the page is sized down to sit on the 1/4 inch edge. Then you can use your eyedropper to select the color of your background, then use your paint bucket and fill the layer below your page to fill the edges. You may have edges that aren’t trimmed exactly on that line, but at least the edge will blend with your page rather than getting white edges.

It sounds like a lot of work, but I resized 55 of my pages in one night. Now that I’m pretty sure I want to print my future books with Viovio, after I make a page, I immediately resize and adjust the page for Viovio so that when it comes time to print my next book, I won’t have to do anything to resize or fix margins.

I hope this helps! I’ll be back later when I move on to the next step (it may be a couple weeks since I am not done scrapping all the photos I want to be in the book).

Here’s an example of a page I had to adjust. My text was right on the edge. (Page credits here)

The resized, adjusted page:

After being VERY frustrated with Shutterfly, MyPicTales, and Artscow… I finally tried Viovio. Shutterfly has VERY grainy prints… MPT does too and prints rather dark and sometimes yellowish, and the Artscow books were washed out.

First, I want to show you the massive difference in prices. The SF, MPT, and AC books are 8×8 and the Viovio book is 8.5×8.5. You can view pricing specs for each company here: SF, MPT, AC, VV. I was a little confused when I checked out with my VV book because it was higher than I expected… this is because their pricing for different papers and binding options are on a different page on the website. The silk paper is an additional 15% on top of the price. If your get the other paper with the pro bound option (apparently the better binding), it’s a flat $3.99 additional charge. Here is a price chart to compare the 8-inch books between the companies. I have chosen the pro bound book for the VV. Also, the custom photo cover does not come standard for MPT (it’s extra) so to be fair I did pricing for a custom cover on all the books.

The bigger the book you do, the greater the savings with VV! Check out that 100 page book! I was amazed at their prices!

Okay, and on to my review. I am so happy with my Viovio book! Unlike my other books, the pictures on the pages aren’t grainy. The colors are great!! The paper is more silky than SF paper but isn’t too glossy. The cover is GORGEOUS! It isn’t quite the quality of my individual Costco prints, but it’s the closest I’ve gotten from a photobook printer! YAY!!! I didn’t have any problems with trimmed edges, but I’m always super careful about my margins.

On the downside, the website is crazy. It is hard to navigate and I had to use this online tutorial to upload my book. I also had the help of Sarah (Sarah8914).. THANKS SARAH!! I did contact customer service a few times and they were very quick to reply and were AWESOME!

Turnaround time is longer than SF. My book took a week and a half to get to me… it shipped earlier than their estimates, but I also chose the sloooowest shipping option they had. lol
I am so pleased and I have found my printer!!

Okay, here are the pictures!!