Turn your Facebook albums into a photo book with Blurb

Blurb provides a quick and easy way to turn all your Facebook photo albums into a printed photo book.

In my blog post called Top 10 tech New Year’s resolutions for 2012, I suggested sorting through all your digital photos and printing some of the best ones to share with family and friends the old fashioned way. I also recommended a few online printing services that I felt were definitely worth checking out: one of which was Blurb.

The company offers a service which I think a lot of Facebook users will love and appreciate – the ability to take your Facebook photo albums and turn them into a physical photo book, including all the captions and comments associated with each photo.  Blurb explains how it works:

To create a book, users simply sign into their Facebook account on the Blurb website. Once the albums are selected they will then autoflow into a Blurb book and a personalized cover will be automatically chosen.  Photo comments and captions associated with a picture are also captured and showcased around the relevant image.  The finished book can then be purchased or edited using Blurb’s online bookmaking tool, Bookify. This seamless experience automatically optimizes your photos and creates a book using the high-quality services that Blurb provides.

As mentioned, you can use the company’s free tool, Bookify, to edit your creation. To me, this is an invaluable tool that, if it wasn’t offered, I probably wouldn’t want to create a Facebook photo book. I have several photos on Facebook that I would love to have printed, including their captions and comments, but there are some comments I would rather not have included – so having the ability to remove comments is wonderful. Another plus to being able to edit/remove comments is that you can correct spelling errors people may have made when commenting on your images.

When editing your Facebook photo book, you can also rearrange the order of your photos. A word of caution, however, is that although you can easily swap positions of two images by simply clicking and dragging, this will only move the photos, not the comments associated with these images. I made this mistake when making my own book and unfortunately I didn’t realise what happened until reviewing the final product – this added a lot of time to the process as I had to go back and look at each photo closely to work out which ones didn’t have the correct comments attached. Despite the troubles I had (which you can now avoid), there is an easy way to move an image and its comments, you just need to hover your mouse over the page, click on “Select Page” and then on “Move Page” to drag the entire page to the desired position.

Once you’re happy with your book, you can have it printed as a softcover or hardcover and choose the quality of paper. Prices vary but start as low as $11.95 for a small square 20-page softcover book. You can also have the photo book created as an iPad-compatible e-book for $1.99.

Something else that’s great about Blurb is that you can sell your creations in the Blurb Bookstore. You can make your books available to the public, or make them available by invite only. I haven’t tested this feature, so I can’t comment on the process but it’s intriguing nonetheless.

To check it out for yourself, visit the Blurb website.