PhotoBox certainly offers good prices on printed album orders, with prints from just 5p each.

But while it was easy enough to register for an account, uploading images proved a little more difficult. PhotoBox’s Easy Upload tool allowed us to find the folder full of images on our hard disk and display the photos as thumbnails. However, the upload tool then seemed to crash.

We resorted to the standard upload tool, which appeared to work fine, but it gave no indication of progress during the transfer.

The complications didn’t stop there. PhotoBox uses a complex system to allocate space for photos. You get 200MB to start with and, for every order placed, you get another 50MB.

According to Photobox, you get unlimited space for print orders, but if the space allowance is exceeded, files will be deleted after two weeks. This system may be logical for PhotoBox, but it’s likely to leave new users confused, at least to begin with.

Once photos have been uploaded to an album, creating a photo book is straightforward. You can choose from five different covers, but only three interior designs.

To save time you can choose the autofill option, which automatically creates different and varied layouts for the pages and fills them with images. We did find horizontal shots were sometimes cropped into vertical frames and vice versa, though.

Uniquely, the layouts include space not just for picture titles but more extended descriptions too. While the other books restrict you to simple captions, here you can add more in-depth travelogues or reports.

What’s more, unlike the Kodak Gallery, the PhotoBox book creation tools stop at 20 pages and don’t continue to add pages automatically. This avoids any nasty surprises at the checkout, although it does mean you need to check that any really important shots haven’t been left out.

The print quality was pretty well identical to that of the Kodak book, but while it’s going to be adequate for most people (especially given the novelty of a professionally bound book), it’s not quite as sharp, rich or smooth as the output you’d get from a photo inkjet.

The PhotoBox album is an inch or so wider than the Kodak or BonusPrint books, so you appear to get a little more for your money. But there’s no protective sheet over the photo showing through the cutout on the cover and, inside, the plain white paper and basic typeface make the PhotoBox book look a little ordinary.

This article is part of a group test of photo albums.
See also:
BonusPrint
Kodak EasyShare Gallery
Snapfish
Choose the best imge format
Go local
Photo Albums
A table of features can be read via our pdf downloads above.