Picaboo

Easy to make and they look great! They have a real variety of stickers and color/texture of pages. So fun!

This site is RIDDLED WITH TECH ISSUES. Buyer beware.

I purchased a PICABOO coupon on Living Social and uploaded my book. Please know that I am a graphic designer/author/illustrator and not a self published one. I have been published by major publishers - so I know what I am doing.

I uploaded the book - reviewed it and submitted it.

When it arrived only the cover and ONE PAGE was printed and there were only 15 pages in the book.

I called them. On my 2nd call to follow up - the customer service representative admitted that there was a TECHNICAL ISSUE - that only one page was printing with many of their customers. Then, FIVE DAYS LATER - after the call - they write me an email to say it was my fault. That I did not "upload" the images from my tray into the book. This is simply not true. The book - when I flipped through the pages before I submitted it, had ALL THE IMAGES. Now all of them have been stripped out.

They clearly had a bug - revamped their system and destroyed people's work!

What is so awful is that tHEY RETROACTIVELY TOOK THE IMAGES OUT OF MY BOOK TO AVOID REFUNDING ME AND COUNTLESS OTHERS! The funniest thing though is the book they sent me had 15 pages. The book in my account has 22. So they forgot to remove my extra pages! Which although doesn't "prove" anything but shows something is clearly amiss.

DO NOT USE THEM!

I wish I could give Picaboo zero stars. I've used them for years. I have probably 10 books printed by them. Yes the software was cumbersome, constantly crashing and took forever to upload photos, but it allowed me to use many backgrounds which the (former) scrapbooker in me enjoyed. Fast forward to 2012-2014 era. I'm not sure if they have different management, ownership or printing machines, but the quality of the products and the customer service has gone down the hill. I have DSLR, and my photos print fantastic on Shutterfly or even at local Walgreens - but in the books made on Picaboo, they are either too dark, too washed out or pixalated. I could do a better job printing on my home computer. I ordered one book each year - 2012, 2013 and 2014 (year in review books of family good times). They are all 100 pages long. I tend to spend months putting them together and printing multiple copies. The printing quality has been deteriorating. In 2012, they told me to take photos of the books and email them. They promptly printed and mailed the new ones. In 2013 they jerked me around for days, but eventually shipped the replacements (they did the "photo corrections" on their end). In 2014, they didn't reply to my emails for weeks, then asked that I take photos of books, then stopped replying to emails... Few weeks later they suggested that I buy all new books ($400 value), they will print them for me, and then they would reimburse me those $400 when the books arrive). What? Imagine if I bought a broken bike at the store and instead of just making even exchange, they made me purchase a bike again, t then reimburse me? Who does this? Who has $400 extra dollars just sitting in their account to let Picaboo use it for a few weeks? What? I hope they go out of business. I certainly hope. I threw the books away and am done with them. It's not even worth it to me to jump trough their hoops, return the books, and instead of getting the money back, have to pay another $400 for them to produce and ship more books that they will then reimburse me for. None of this makes sense. Go away Picaboo. Your groupons, coupons, living social deals, amazon deals will not hep you! You are doomed.