Tabblo.com

Site of the Week: Tabblo.com

Price: PhotoCubes, free; Postcards, $1.49; Posters, $7.95 to $44.95; Books, $9.95 to $34.95

By Jennifer L. DeLeo

Click here to visit tabblo.com
If you own a digital camera, you probably already use an online photo service to upload and store your collection. But what have you done with your pics lately? Instead of letting them collect cyberdust, bring them to life with Tabblo. The company, recently acquired by HP, provides an online photo service that lets you create and order printed versions of your photos in postcard, poster, and book form. Tabblo launched custom Valentine’s Day cards on February 5, 2007. Ten days later, according to company reps, it received 7,000 orders for custom Valentine’s Day cards. Today, over half a million users visit each month and 100,000-plus order digital photo products.  

To get started, you choose a postcard, poster, or book, and upload the photos you want to include. There’s no storage limit, and you can even upload from Flickr and Picasa. Once you’ve finished the transfer, you choose a name for your project. The site automatically sets the poster size at 8.5 by 11 inches, but you can change it. In the future, though, you’ll have to choose a size before proceeding. To do so, you click on Poster in the upper left-hand corner, and select the desired dimensions, up to 16 by 60 inches, which I chose for my poster, a collection of shots I took recently at an outdoor exhibit in New Jersey.

To make and save changes to a project, you have to create a free account. The site’s interface—a bit unintuitive at the moment—makes choosing a project difficult. I had to log out and back in to find the options on the homepage, so for your first visit, I’d advise choosing a project before creating an account.

You’ll find over 40 layouts and 36 styles. The built-in editor automatically places photos into the layout for you, but you can drag images to different positions. You mouse over a photo to use the Scale & Pan, Rotate, and Orientation features, and a button lets you change effects, which include black-and-white and oil painting. With the Tools/Photos bar, located on the right side of the screen, you can change the color and text of your layout, as well as shuffle, add, and upload photos. You can also give photos text captions. Unfortunately, you can’t change the font, and inexperienced Web users might find moving photos around and selecting the different tools unintuitive. To preview your project, you click on Finish. The entire process took me about 20 minutes, from uploading to selecting the poster size and layout to arranging photos.—next: Purchase Page >

Source: Site of the week: Tabblo.com: Full Review - Review by PC Magazine