Miserable Experience with Photobook Worldwide
I created about 20 gorgeous photobooks on Photobook America and was always super satisfied with my ability to design every page exactly as I wanted. They featured a fantastic array of preset page layouts, all of which could be entirely altered and customized down to the most nuanced details. Moreover, you could start with a totally blank slate and design each page according to your imagination, or you could drop your photos into a project, select a format, and let their design feature fill it for you automatically then tweak from there if inclined. In layout and details, you could go as elegant and tasteful or as campy and silly as you liked with all of the options to customize and you could fill the pages with as many images as heart desired. Now that they're Photobook Worldwide, the design platform has completely changed. It's been dumbed down to entirely basic, with extremely limited preset layouts that are repetitive and unimaginative. What's worse, their "expert mode," is limited to what a child could do. You can't even fully resize or move a frame. Custom designing the pages is all but impossible, and they now limit the number of images you can fit in a spread to six. You also can't arrange page by page, but have to work in spreads. The design platform itself is extremely clunky and frustrating, with the layout zooming and shifting every time you make a change, such that you can't even see the full spread on your screen as the default. Maybe it was designed for a phone and for people looking to get something simple done quickly, but for anyone looking to create something special, this platform may not work. I am EXTREMELY frustrated trying to create a gift for my mom and probably will never use the site again to create a book unless major updates restore some of its previous functionality. I'm almost afraid to complete and order a book for fear the quality of their product and service has declined to match the poor experience I'm having on their site. I spent too much time uploading and figuring out how to use the new platform to delete and start over somewhere else, but I'm writing this review to save someone else similar frustrations if they are into creating meaningful projects with rich designs. The company also is not transferring saved projects from the old site to the new, and there's no way of downloading them, so if anything ever happens to your books, you can't order others. Their suggestion is to keep copies of your original photos and recreate the books in case of loss. Wow.