The way wedding albums are put together has changed as much as what’s inside them. There’s now a whole range of choices that, until the last few years, were out of reach for all but the most extravagant of brides.
Paste-in Photo Albums
Traditional albums—in which photos are pasted onto cardboard-backed pages—are still alive and kicking. They’re especially popular with brides whose photo packages include a disc of high-resolution images (and who enjoy scrapbooking); indeed, these albums are essentially scrapbooks. Just print out your favorite pics, stick them between the page and the plastic, and you’ve got an album. With covers ranging from cardboard to fabric to tooled leather, they come either as books with blank pages, design templates or binders whose pages can be interchanged.
Flush Mount Photo Albums
Similar to traditional albums, flush-mount albums are composed of thick, semi-rigid pages and are offered in a variety of covers. Here the pages are printed on photo paper, mounted to card stock at the factory, then bound into a book. The digital revolution makes it easy for photographers to create designs incorporating multiple photos, text and other elements. And since the book can lie flat, facing pages are designed together as single spreads. Although there’s a temptation to clutter these up like a scrapbook, Chan Park, graphics manager at PictoBooks, warns against it. The best designs tend to average about six images per spread, he notes, so a 20-spread book contains a respectable 120 images.
Press-Printed Photo Albums
Press-printed wedding albums are essentially books that have taken advantage of the digital revolution to create single- or short-run copies without the production costs associated with traditional printing. “We’re essentially a custom publisher,” explains Margaret Telfer of Minneapolis-based PhotoBook Press, which creates museum-quality books for customers worldwide.
Unlike flush-mount books, press-printed albums have thinner pages, allowing more of them to be bound together—up to 80 in the case of the Japanese hand-manufactured AsukaBook. “You can get more images,” says Clare Kubota of AsukaBook’s U.S. distributor.
Brides can also drop their images into templates at websites like Blurb.com and MyPublisher, and get a 40-page hardbound book delivered to their door for as low as $30. But be careful, warn both Kubota and Telfer, because you may get what you pay for.
Other Photo Album Options
Wedding albums these days come in all shapes and sizes, covers and costs, remarks Telfer. Soft-cover books can make great “parent albums.” Pocket-sized “brag books” are often given as thank-you gifts to the wedding party. Books can have a photo as their cover, or perhaps don a dust jacket. And for those who really want their pictures to be housed in style, there’s always PictoBooks’ jewel-encrusted precious-metal-covered album.