Shutterfly’s easy-to-navigate site can help you assemble your perfect custom photo book with over a dozen occasion templates and book sizes to choose from. It offers tutorials and ideas to help you create your book if you want to start entirely from scratch. 

To use Shutterfly, you can browse and select a template and upload your photos into the preselected slots. You can add text, design elements and other customizations to your book. You can also use Shutterfly’s free 24-hour designer service. This service helps take some of the legwork out of the creation process. You can upload anywhere from 50 to 800 photos, and Shutterfly experts will select the best images so your book isn’t repetitive or blurry. You can advise how the expert selects which photos to use, how images are sequenced and the amount of design elements or embellishments you’d like.

For the best results, upload and use print-quality photos from your computer or select from photos already uploaded to your Shutterfly, Facebook or Instagram accounts. Any photo you use has to be in JPEG format. 

How much it costs: Before shipping and tax, an 8-by-11-inch 20-page softcover photo book would cost about $22. Shutterfly frequently runs sales, so you can be on the lookout for promo codes to apply to your purchase to save some money. As you add or delete elements from your project, Shutterfly will tell you that the price of your project has changed.

Mixbook’s minimalist layout makes it very easy to use. The site has dozens of fun photo book themes — family, seasonal, wedding, travel, baby — and more specific designs in each category, perfect for photo gifts. There’s also the option to put a book together from scratch. Mixbook lets you upload print-quality photos from your computer or phone as well as from Facebook and Instagram, and ones you’ve already uploaded to the site. Mixbook offers a lot of customization options. You can choose from multiple page finishes and different cover option styles. If you want to get fancy, you can even add matte finishes, a hard cover or leather with a dust jacket.

I used Mixbook to organize my wedding photos and to make a photo book for my dad’s birthday. It was easy to add and edit photos, text, extra pages and embellishments to the template I chose. You can swap themes at any time and the photos will transfer over, but from what I can tell, you have to change the pages manually. Both photo books I made turned out great and arrived in a timely fashion.

You can be as creative as you want and veer away from the template as you like — or stick with the presets. As you build your book, you can click Preview to see how the final product will look. When you’re satisfied with your book, click Order to finalize the photo book size, page and cover finish. 

How much it costs: Photo books can be ordered in landscape, portrait or square shape in 6-by-6-, 8.5-by-8.5-, 10-by-10- and 12-by-12-inch sizes. An 8.5-by-8.5-inch, 20-page softcover book with the regular semi-gloss page finish — all the cheapest options — will cost you around $21. Designing a larger book with more bells and whistles will raise the final price. However, like its competitors, Mixbook frequently runs promotions that can save you some serious cash.

If you’re looking to make a photo book without breaking the bank, consider creating one through Walmart’s website. You can customize your photo book’s size, from 5-by-7 inches all the way up to 12-by-12 inches, as well as the cover type, binding and how fast you want it delivered. I tested out Walmart’s Classic Black album template since I already had the photos available. The book was available for home delivery, same-day pick up and site-to-store delivery. Along with sizes, Walmart’s templates have multiple options for covers, but depending on how you mix and match customization options, not every style is available for each configuration. 

Walmart lets you upload photos from your computer, Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Dropbox and Google Photos, but the site will only hold onto the photos for one year. It was easy to drag and drop photos or swap layout pages in the template. After dropping a photo in, you can click it to make any adjustments. However, Walmart provides fewer photo-editing options — a black-and-white or a sepia filter, the ability to crop, zoom and tilt; brightness adjustment and red-eye elimination — compared to other websites. While building your book, you can swap templates at any time, but the photos you’ve placed won’t transfer, and you’ll need to place them into the new layout. One of the downsides to Walmart’s photo books, though, was the lack of embellishments. The program lets you add text, but the ability to add “stickers” like those on other sites, would’ve taken the design process up a level. 

Once you’re finished with your project, click Next to review your photo book in a storyboard format before you order. There’s also an option to preview the entire book page by page if you want a more detailed review before ordering. You’ll get an alert if you’ve left any slots blank.

How much it costs: Walmart’s 8-by-11-inch, 20-page, hardcover glossy photo book costs about $29 before shipping and tax.

If you’re not keen on making an account and getting a slew of promotional emails, Mailpix might be the way to go. With this photo book company, you can make a photo book as a guest, no account needed. Mailpix offers premium ultra layflat, layflat, hardcover book and softcover photo book styles, ranging from 8-by-8- to 11-by-14-inch books. The site recommends designing the book on a computer and using JPEG files. You can pick out styles for almost every occasion — birthday celebrations, Mother’s and Father’s day, holidays like Christmas, Halloween and Hanukkah and pet themes. 

Mailpix guides you through the process step by step, so you won’t feel lost or overwhelmed. There’s a nice variety of page layouts to choose from, and you can choose how many pages are in the book and how many images are on each page. Mailpix provides guidance on image sizing for the highest quality outcome and warns you if a photo’s resolution is too low. There’s also an autofill option that helps save time putting all your images in. As you’re building your book, Mailpix puts a red line around the page indicating that a section might be cropped out during the photo book printing. 

Mailpix updates your price total as you go along, so you’re not caught off-guard by the final price at checkout. When you’re satisfied with your book, name it and choose how many copies you’d like to order. Select a cover style, add a photo if you’d like and check out.

How much it costs: An 8.5-by-11-inch hardcover book with a standard 20 pages came to $28 before tax and shipping — ground shipping is $19, express shipping runs $20. On Mailpix, every additional page costs $1.20.

If you use Google Photos, you can avoid uploading your photos into another app and create a hassle-free photo book on your phone with photo books from Google Photos. In the Google Photos app or on desktop, tap the shopping bag icon (on my Google Pixel 5 phone, it’s at the top left of the screen). Tap Photo Books to get started, and you can choose from a few premade albums based on your photos, like Winter Vacation 2023 — the premade albums can be edited as well. 

There’s also the option to start from scratch and manually add all the photos by tapping Make Photo Book at the bottom of the screen. You can add up to 90 photos to your book. Once you’ve got all the images you want, you can add a title for your book, hold and drag to rearrange pages, and further edit by tapping on a page. 

Google Photos is probably the easiest and most basic choice if you’re going to order a photo book. It offers a minimalist layout for photo books, with white pages and places for you to add captions to your photos. There aren’t embellishments like there are on Mixbook, but you can still make creative layouts with multiple photos. Google Photos still has editing options in its app for you to add filters before creating a book. 

How much it costs: A hardcover 9-by-9-inch photo book costs $30 for 20 pages and 99 cents for each additional page. A softcover 7-by-7-inch photo book costs $15 for 20 pages and 49 cents for each additional page before shipping.