Flickr debuts one-click photo book publishing service

 

 

For the last six months or so, it's been all change at Yahoo-owned photo-sharing service Flickr, and as we've reported on our news page, that change hasn't always been well-received. The company's latest tweak to its offerings is likely to prove rather more popular, however.

Flickr's new photo book publishing service is available immediately to customers in the continental U.S., and Yahoo is planning to expand availability to other markets over time. Each photo book can have anywhere from 20 to 240 pages in white proPhoto lustre paper, comes wrapped with a glossy hard cover and matching glossy dust jacket, and measures 11 x 8.5 inches. Full-bleed printing, where your photos fill the entire page without a border, is possible.

For those who find manually laying-up a photo book to be too much work, Flickr's book creation tool allows one-click publishing, and can handle cropping and positioning automatically. (There's a Book icon on each photo set, which can be used to order a book with that particular set.) If you prefer to hone your own creation, though, the tools to do so are available. In some respects, functionality so far seems fairly basic, though. For example, there doesn't yet appear to be any way to add text to a photo book, unless you manually add the text to your images before uploading them to Flickr.

The new photo books expand Flickr's print offerings, which already included prints, posters, photo cards, calendars, collage gifts, gallery wrapped canvas, metallic prints, and a variety of photo gifts. Pricing is set at US$34.95, plus US$0.50 per additional page after the 20th page. (That makes a full 240-page book rather pricey, at almost US$150.) It isn't immediately clear whether shipping is included in this price, but we have an enquiry in with Yahoo to clarify this point, and will update this article once we hear back from them.

More details can be found on the Flickr blog, and you can make a photo book for yourself at Flickr Creator.