Photo Magic: Create Custom Photo Books with Text Messages
The 21st century appears to be all about speed: order a pizza from your phone with a tap of your finger, dispense your favorite coffee with a push of a button, and now with a simple text message, you can order a customized photo book with all your favorite moments.
Photo Magic is a new service provided by publishing company SimplePrints. Simply send a text message to a special number and you can begin building your own personalized 8” x 8” softcover or hardcover masterpiece.
We decided to give the service a spin by texting “hello” to their service number, (415) 726-2982. You should note that standard text messaging rates do apply, so if your mobile plan does not have unlimited texting then you may want to keep an eye on just how long your conversation goes.
Within a minute, we received a message back from a representative named Sarah.
She was happy to assist us in creating our book and we continued to work with her over the next hour, tweaking and editing exactly how we wanted our book to look.
Sarah informed us that to create a book the company needs a minimum of 21 photographs. Utilizing a four image-per-page layout and the services’ maximum of 200 pages, 804 is the largest number of photos a book can support – quite impressive. Standard books are 20-pages long, with each additional page costing 50 cents each.
We would have loved the ability to send our images via text message directly to Photo Magic, but instead the company sent us a secure Dropbox link to upload our pictures. We decided to create an Easter themed book with photos from the first half of this year. The process of creation took about 30 minutes.
After Sarah organized our book, she sent us a digital link to preview the result. An interesting tidbit about Photo Magic is that computer algorithms don’t take over the entire creation process, but instead assist in the hand placement of images.
We loved how it looked but decided to add a title to the cover. Adding a title took Sarah a bit more time, but we were able to enjoy our lives while the Photo Magic team worked away.
Photo Magic currently offers two books at this time, an 8×8” hardcover and an 8×8” softcover book. Each book has a matte cover finish while the inside pages are 100 lb. semigloss. The service is currently available within the United States with a hardcover book costing around $30 after shipping and a softcover book costing around $20.
From our brief experience with Photo Magic, we enjoyed the uniquely catered process they provided. Our representative, Sarah, did an excellent job with our book and was able to answer all of our questions about the service itself. If you are looking for a quick way to create a beautiful and affordable photo book, then Photo Magic just might be an excellent option.
