Make a photobook

Any album can become a printed book. Media Moana lays it out as a book's pages — spreads, a cover with its spine, the bleed and the safe margins a printer asks for — and makes the two PDF files a printer takes: the pages and the cover. You upload them to the printer yourself, as your own book. Media Moana doesn't sell printing; the files are yours, and making them is free.

Open the album, go to its Share tab and choose Make a photobook… under Ways to send it. You don't need a share link for it.

Choose a printer and a size

The book is laid out for one printer's size, because each printer trims and binds a little differently:

Choose the same size when you order. The pages carry the bleed the printer cuts away (for Blurb on the top, bottom and outside edge only, as it asks) and keep words and photos clear of the edges and the binding.

The cover is a paperback's: the back, the spine and the front in one file. Lulu publishes its spine width, so the book works it out from the page count. Blurb gives it only in its specification calculator, for your page count and paper — copy its Gutter / Spine width (in inches) into Spine width and the cover is made with it. A spine wide enough carries the album's title.

What goes in the book

• The album's template decides the layout. Gallery and Film: a photo to a page, two to a page when both fit well, a panorama across a spread. Story: each chapter opens on a spread — its heading on the left, its opening photo across the whole right-hand page — then its photos in ones, twos and threes, a captioned photo with its caption as a quote. Contact Sheet: numbered frames on proof pages, the highlights circled.
• What visitors see decides the words, as on the share page: the captions and description, and each photo's date, place and camera only when you show them (see What visitors see).
• Page one is the title page. The book is filled to the printer's minimum — 20 pages for Blurb, 32 for Lulu — and to an even page count with blank pages at the end, never in the middle.
• Which photos: all of them, or the album's highlights. A book holds at most 300 photos and 200 pages; a bigger album makes the highlights or its first 300 photos.
• Photos still being processed are left out, and the dialog says how many.

Turn through the spreads before you make it: the preview is the same layout as the PDF.

Sharp prints: the dpi warnings

A printed photo needs about 300 pixels for every inch of paper it covers. The dialog names any photo that has fewer than 200 for the space it gets — it may print soft — and any under 150, which will. Give such a photo a page of its own, choose a smaller size, or leave it out. After the files are made, the dialog checks again from the pixels each photo was really printed from: a RAW photo is printed from the JPEG preview the camera stored in it, which is sometimes smaller than the photo.

Make the PDFs

Make the PDFs builds both files in your browser from your full-size photos, one photo at a time — keep the tab open until it's done. Stop ends it and keeps nothing. Then download the pages and the cover, and upload them to your printer's own-PDF option (Blurb's PDF to Book; at Lulu, a print book made from your own files).

• Nothing is made on Media Moana's servers, and nothing is kept: closing the dialog or the tab leaves no file anywhere.
• No location goes into the files. Every photo is redrawn without its EXIF data, so no GPS position travels in the book; a place appears only as words, when you show it.
• The photos are drawn in sRGB, as consumer printers expect. A TIFF the browser can't open is printed from its smaller viewing copy, and named in the dpi warnings.