Mixbook

Mixbook is a printing service that packs a punch. We are impressed with the professional elements that you can add to your pages, as well as the variety of templates and themes you can choose from.

This photo printing service allows you to have a page layout that can contain a whopping 21 photos. That's a lot of photos on one page, but it could create a great visual effect. It also allows you to include pages that don't have photos, just text. That means if you are creating a scrapbook of your new baby, you could include a few photo pages, as well as just a text template for journaling your thoughts on the experience.

Depending on the theme that you choose at the beginning of the process, you will get a variety of themed pages as well as a few stickers that fit with that theme. We chose a summer-splash theme, so our pages and embellishments were bright and colorful with images of the beach, suntan lotion and flip-flops.

Even if you do choose a pre-designed layout or template, you can still make it your own. For example, we were able to customize each of our summer-themed pages with textiles and colorful backgrounds as well as images that conjure up thoughts of summer, such as suns, sunglasses and palm trees. Even though these were part of the actual pre-designed page, we could rotate each element, add a shadow or transparency level or simply delete it. We love this idea because you get quick-and-ready themed templates, but Mixbook still gives you the opportunity to be creative.

You may be in the middle of a project and aren't feeling the concept. No worries, you can choose a completely new layout and theme and your photos will not be affected. This will make the creation process so much more fluid. You can test different templates until you find the look you're envisioning.

Whether you are creating a scrapbook, a calendar or a custom greeting card, you'll need some photographs, of course. You can import your favorite photos from your computer, thumb drive and SD card, as well as your Facebook, Flickr, PhotoBucket, Picasa and SmugMug accounts. Mixbook actually allows you to import your photos from more places than any other printing service.

Just a note, if you are planning to use the pictures from your Facebook account, remember that they will not be high-resolution images. So unless you shrink Facebook images down, Mixbook will label them low resolution and your print quality will suffer. If you totally miss the low-resolution symbols while in the design process, before you purchase the final product, a huge red box with "print quality warnings" will appear in the shopping cart, suggesting that you either switch out the photo or make it a smaller size on the page.

Once you have imported your images, you can use them for each of your projects.

Unlike a few other printing solutions, Mixbook does not require you to download a third-party application in order to create your photo album and other projects. We appreciate this, as a web-based application definitely has its perks. When you create an account with Mixbook, every project that you create with them will be saved to your account. These projects are fully accessible at any time. Also, if your computer ever crashes you could lose all of your saved photo albums. With a web-based application, you can access your Mixbook account from anywhere at any time.

The photo library provided by the printing service is a bit untraditional, but it works. Instead of having all of your images in one central location, you can only view your photos by project. So, for example, we created a calendar and two photobooks one that had a summer theme and another that featured autumn images. So, if we wanted to use any of our fall pictures in another project, we would need to navigate to our Days of Autumn photobook in our library.

The more we used this service, we found our attitude altering from "Ooh, we love that feature!" to "Get us out of here!" And while we realize that no printing service is perfect, we do wish that one aspect in particular was easier work with: the user interface. We became the most frustrated during the creation of our calendar. On the homepage, we chose to create a calendar first. You go through several steps, including selecting the theme, sizing and pricing options that we wanted. After signing into our account, we started our project. After placing a few pictures, we decided that we did not like this theme or size. So, instead of having the option to switch templates, we had to totally close out of the application and start anew. The photobook creation process allows you to change whatever you want at anytime, so we are confused at why that user-friendly feature was not carried through to other photo projects.

Besides this glitch, we do feel that this website and the scrapbook application have a good flow and each feature is self-explanatory.

Occasionally you may experience a technical issue while creating a photo project. Mixbook does not have the best support options available, so we recommend that you take the time to scan through the FAQs on the website before beginning any project. This section is broken up into categories, which makes navigating to a specific topic of questions simple. You will find frequently asked questions covering the following:

• Orders
• Payments
• Account & Website
• Printing
• Shipping & Returns
• Mixbook Editor
• Technical Support
• Customer Service

You can contact Mixbook by phone or through their live chat support Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. PST. You can also fill out the contact form found on the service's website. According to the website, a representative will get back to you within 24 to 48 business hours.

Overall, the user interface is easy to navigate, but don't change your mind halfway through a project or you might have to start over. This printing service did impress us, however, with the variety of ways you can import your photos, as well as the page layouts that let you have up to 21 pictures per page.