The Easiest Way To Create A Photo Book – No App Required
Preserving your memories is important. At Collage, we are dedicated to making it as easy as possible to get the important photos in your life off your phone or computer and on to objects you can hold and share with friends. And there’s no better way to save a lot of photos than in a photo book.
For the past several months, our team has been hard at work reimagining the best way to make photo books. Our goal was simple: Make the easiest, fastest and most intuitive photo book experience, and make it available anywhere, on any device. We wanted you to be able to create the perfect photo book of your memories wherever you are when inspiration strikes, without having to switch to a computer or download an app. We listened to your feedback and the frustrations you’ve encountered when creating photo books and solved the underlying issues. Some of the changes we made, such as our new design view, you’ll see when creating your book. Others, like improved gestures, you’ll encounter but are hopefully so intuitive that you’ll hardly notice them. Still other changes, like speed and performance improvements, are entirely under the hood, but critical for creating an app-like experience without requiring any downloads.
Here is a look at the key features that set the Collage.com photo book experience apart.
No App Required
If you’re anything like us, all of your favorite photos are stored on your phone. But downloading an app, waiting for it to install, creating an account, logging in, and watching the tutorial is a lot to sit through before you’ve added even a single photo to your book. The reason most of those other companies make you install an app is simple: their websites aren’t fast or user friendly enough to manage on a phone. Forcing you to use an app is easier for them than improving their website.
We took another approach and designed our photo book experience to be optimized for mobile web browsers from the ground up. The result means you can dive in and start creating the perfect photo book in seconds — no downloads or new accounts required.
New Intuitive Layout
Designing a 20+ page photo book on a phone screen can be a challenge. It can be hard to see an overview of your entire book, while still showing enough detail to make sure every page is right.
We’ve redesigned our book experience based on customer feedback to make it intuitive for first-time users and seasoned book builders alike to add photos, customize their layouts, and add, remove and re-arrange pages, all with the swipe of a finger.
The first change you’ll encounter is our redesigned project overview. Here you can see several pages at a time, even on a small screen. Want to re-arrange pages? Just tap and hold the page to move it somewhere else in the book. Want to delete it? Just drag it into the trash area that appears in the lower left.
To get a closer look at an individual page, simply tap it in the overview. You’ll be taken to our improved page view, where you’ll have access to your Photo Drawer, as well as text, background, layout and other design tools at the bottom of the screen. Once you’re done editing, just hit the All Pages button in the upper left corner to return to the Project Overview screen.
In addition to the visible changes, we’ve also added new touchscreen gestures, including drag and drop functionality, to make arranging, resizing and editing your book on mobile devices easy.
Photo Drawer
One of the biggest frustrations we heard from customers is that it was hard to keep all of their available photos organized when working on individual pages of their photo book. We solved this problem by creating a new photo drawer that appears at bottom of the screen, just below the page you are editing. The photo drawer contains all of the unused photos that you’ve uploaded, but which are not currently on any page in your photo book. You can move photos between the page and the photo drawer by touching and dragging the image. The photo drawer stays with you as you change between pages, allowing you to pull a picture off one page and put it onto another.
The photo drawer gives you easy control to make sure every photo is in exactly the right place.
Note for longtime users: Photos are added and removed on the page view screen instead of from the overview. We believe you’ll find this new approach easier to use.
Performance Improvements
In addition to usability and design improvements, we’ve also rebuilt our photo builder to be faster, more reliable and more responsive. These are not changes that you’ll see, but will make it so that you can reliably create a photo book whenever and wherever you like — just as long as you have your phone or computer.