The other day my qoop.com book arrived! Qoop has a partnership with Flickr, and users can order books and posters and such of their photos. Ordinarily I’m happy to be rid of the clutter of paper copies of photos, but I made an exception with I finished my year in photos project. Having a printed copy of all 365 entries is just too cool!
Unfortunately, cool is not cheap. This volume ran me around $40. Not something I’d do often, but as a splurge it was manageable.
Anyway, on to quality. I went with four photos per 8.5 x 11 page, for a 90something page count, and everything is crisp and viewable. I also had the book perfect bound, instead of stapled, and it looks very durable as a result. My captions for each photo are included as well. I was worried that some might be cut for length, but photo placement and font size is adjusted a bit where necessary to make sure nothing is lost. I’m sure there’s an upper limit to this adjusting, but I didn’t run into it.
My only real complaint is that there isn’t enough customization available. In particular, I would have loved to be able to design a better cover. The set of photos there is chosen at random, and I was allotted two short lines of text. If I liked some photos but not others, I had to generate an entire new random set. It took me an absurd number of tries to get one that I mostly like.
While this is unrelated to Qoop themselves, I was also disappointed with DHL’s shipping time of my book. The package got lost in limbo somewhere, and spent three days bouncing back and forth between Atlanta and Chatanooga. Thankfully the book was packaged very nicely, and suffered no harm.
So in summary: Due to the price, I wouldn’t recommend Qoop for mass production. But for one-off copies like this, I’m quite happy.