Rant - Sony Imagestation is closing

Last year a cousin contacted me saying she wanted to put together a photobook for one of our Uncles who had recently lost his wife in a house fire. She wanted to gather photos from all of the relatives which is no small feat considering the size of our family. I immediately jumped on board to help her. We wanted the book to have photos off all of us, we also wanted to be able to work on it together. But the most important things were the number of photos and being able to have captions on all the photos. With 8 Uncles and wives, 4 Aunts and husbands, 29 Cousins & spouses and 40 1 Cousins once removed (Cousins kids) and the fact that many of us left New Jersey in the 70's so there are quite a few of us who have not seen each other since then. Not to mention 30 some odd years can change people we REALLY needed the ability to caption the photos.

So while my cousin put the call out for photos I started researching places to have our book made.

Snapfish was first. My cousin had set up a Group Room where we could all submit photos to use in the book. But when we went to create our book we found the layouts restricting and no capability of adding caption/text where ever we wanted. Plus you could not zoom in on a photo within the book making process.

Shutterfly while it has a number of layouts it again was restricting in allowing text where ever we wanted it. And you could not zoom in on the photos.

Since I am a Mac user I checked out the book making option in iLife but it too only had pre determined layouts with little or no captions.

Picaboo was next. While we were able to work on the book and send it to each other to review and comment, the pre determined layouts were very restricting and we could not put text where we wanted. After getting all the photos in that we wanted our book was priced at 117.00. Obviously this was too expensive.

My Publisher - You can zoom, flip, rotate and move the photo within the photo well but again you are limited to the layouts the company provides.

Sony Imagestation was a god send! Not only could we put photos where we wanted and what size we wanted but we could also put text where ever we wanted! We were actually able to get all the same photos we had in the Picaboo book PLUS many many others. Our book actually has 310 photos and 7 document images on 48 pages and cost us aprox 54.00 for the linen book. That is quite a difference in price compared to the one we did in Picaboo.

We had 1 to 2 pages for each Aunt or Uncle's family and pages for Communion, Wedding, Christmas, Halloween & Birthday photos.

Where the other companies are more concerned with layouts and background pages, Imagestation was more about the user having TOTAL control over the look and feel of their book.


sample of one of our Birthday photo pages


sample of a Wedding page


sample of a Family page



samples showing photos, images and text where WE wanted them

Since doing this book we lost a cousin to cancer so it is just that much more special to us. One of our other cousins was inspired by what we did that he has started scanning all his families photos.

We were hoping to do another book next year with updated photos of all of us, as some photos we had were very out of date. But with Imagestation closing we will have to wait longer till some other company offers the 'freestyle' format of putting things where you want them. If anyone knows if such a company exists please let me know.