A few months ago Mpix jumped on the photo book bandwagon. Their software is a whopping 65 meg download, but they give you a lot of flexibility in designing your book and each page.

They have both soft and hard cover books in a few different sizes. Hard cover books are available in 5×5, 10×10 and 8.5×11 inches and start at $20 for 20 pages. Soft cover are available in 5.5×5.5, 8.5×8.5 and 7.75×10 and start at $15 for 12 pages. Additional pages are only 50 cents each.

Using the Book Wizard allows you to select a book style, add images, and the software builds your book. You can then go edit and change any page. Insert new pages, change the backgrounds or fade them, add more photos or resize them. It’s all under your control.

Without using the Wizard it’s a bit more work to layout your book, but having the ability to customize every bit of it is worth it.

1. Pick a page layout from the 30 or so available and add a background from the 80 or more patterns.
2. Add a text box or image anywhere on the page.
3. Rotate any image to any angle, or convert to B&W or Sepia.
4. Resize any image box, even the ones on the canned page templates.
5. Use any font installed on your system instead of being limited to certain fonts.

The MyPublisher software I talked about yesterday is quite nice, but not as flexible as the Mpix package. If you want total control over your photo book layout and design, give Mpix a shot.