ifolor Designer: Photo Books 4+

Don’t use the Photos plug-in, use the separate App.

At first glance the plug-in seems great, with plenty of print product offerings. However, when I wanted to create some booklets for family members, I was sent off on a trail of frustration that just got worse and worse.

There are no effective instructions and, even for a pretty computer-literate user, the plug-in is not intuitive. It re-sizes and re-orders photos in a seemingly random way, yet only offers the ability to zoom in further on already-cropped photos, rather than zoom out so you can at least get the whole photo in. If you slect more than the default number of pages for a booklet (and the large number of pages available was what attracted me in the first place), then it doesn’t repopulate the booklet to use the extra pages.

However: the App is completely different! For a start, it has a good instruction book when you launch it, and it also allows you to choose your proposed product before loading the photos; pricing included. These two features alone overcome the biggest frustrations of the Photos plug-in.

Developer Response ,

Thanks a lot for your review, it helps us optimize the Designer.

Better than the Apple print products ever were...

Like everyone I’m disappointed that Apple have discontinued their photo print products - printing straight from the Photos app was very convenient & it was great that your data was all in 1 place.
However don’t despair - the ifolor Designer seems superior in every other way. The app allows you to reach straight into the Photos app to select the photos you want from your custom folders & this updates dynamically if you change something in Photos. It works really well. The actual layout & composition tools are much more modern & less restrictive than the old Photos book templates, & books feel quicker to produce becuase of this. Delivery also seems much quicker than Apple - 5 working days or so. Swiss efficiency! And the actual finished quality of the books seems much higher in terms of print quality, paper & binding - they make the old books feel a bit cheap in comparison. Finally it’s very unusual that when you place the order the acknowledgement email comes from ifolor's managing director & gives you his name; a very pleasant personal touch in a digital world.

Some issues but editing options are great

First, Don’t try and edit using ifolor within Photos- projects- on a mac- it is very, very glitchy and unstable, even though Photos shows the Ifolour as a project option and, will let you work this way- JUST Don’t. Use the Ifolour designer app direct from your desktop and it is a pretty good and intuitive app- functions very differently used this way. Plentiful edit options for every page. A couple of issues in that you cannot change a book size after editing, or do a larger or smaller copy, ie- A3 to A4, which is frustrating, and uploads can be a bit hit and miss with unstable connections at Ifolors end. Also the app seems to jump around and won’t allow you to set a page location of your choice when trying to return to specific pages, so it can be a bit time consuming scrolling back and forth on a long project. Make a working copy periodically as it can be a bit quick to make unwanted decisions for you. Otherwise Very functional and creative. Haven’t had a book back yet but it would seem print quality is a real positive.

Developer Response ,

Thanks for the review! We are constantly working at making it even more intuitive and offer additional features.