[keithwee] Review of the Fujifilm Year Album Service


keithwee

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Aug 20, 2010
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Review of the FUJIFILM Year Album service.

Like many of you all here, I love to see my images and memorable moments in print and I have always pondered over this problem.

And so well….


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And as time went by, the questions became:

How do I have all these instax prints on the wall of my home organised in a more efficient manner? And can I even start organising some 3000++ soft copy images of my child’s first 16 months into a hardcopy print photo album.

And I finally found my solution and that’s the background for this review.

A preview of the final product ;):

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The Fujifilm Year Album service is one of the latest innovations to be released this August 2015 and is a one stop solution if your aim is for a professional printed photo album.

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With this Year Album service, some might wonder: Why use this when I can do it in Lightroom or any other album editing software?
I can share two reasons why anyone will consider the Year Album Service:

The Year Album service software is an one stop solution guiding the user from very first step of organising your images, choosing the ‘best images’ for you based on their smart algorithms, to the design of the album down to the very last step of choosing which shop to collect the final product.

Such a one stop solution is currently not available in any product anyone can find in the market, at least not without a huge premium / cost incurred.

And so reasons…

1. You belong to the group of ever wanting to have your beautiful or memorable images printed in an album layout but never got to it because the learning curve’s too steep?

2. Scratching your head over how to choose the best 200 images for print from a repository of 10,000 images? The Year Album service has a solution to that.
Look at my problem here.

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Then the Fujifilm Year Album Service is for you, and allow me to share the process.
 

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Thanks to the nice people at Fujifilm Asia Pacific (Singapore), I was given the opportunity to do a sample photobook of an A5 sized album of 24 pages containing up to 130 frames.

I am going to share on the whole process of setting up the album from scratch so anyone reading this will end up getting a step by step manual too.

Of course, firstly there are various album sizes and here’s the available options.


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So now let’s start the review of the process ;) I went through the whole process myself and so its really clearly a process which works.

To start off, go to: www.year-album.sg

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Register an account.

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Once done, you will be presented 2 options to design the album.

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A. Do it yourself on the PC (and this is what the review is all about here)

B. Go to a shop with this service with your images and have them do it for you. (erm, come on!)

if at this point you decide to go to the shop for this service, pls go under the drop-down list on the site for your choice of 48 shop locations and then proceed to close the browser lol
 

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Let’s go ahead with Option A.

Once you select the : ‘Make it on your PC’ option, you will be brought to this page.

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Download and install the ‘Year Album SG’ software.

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Recommended system specs.

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This whole process took lesser than 5 mins on my system.
 

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Once the installation is done, run the software ‘Year Album SG’ and you will be presented the following screen:

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Advice is once you see this screen: Login into your account.

A quickie flow chart of the whole one software to clear the whole process flowchart that you will be experiencing in a while.

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And heh., your photo album creation process starts!

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An overall super easy to use process, select the dates (periods of images you wish the software to consider) plus the folders where the images will come from.
 

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You have now set the foundation for the bulk of the process.

Now its time for the magic of the “Year Album” software’s Image organiser Technology (propriety of Fujifilm) to work, it will sift through your whole repository (up to a maximum of 10,000 images) using 3 smart functions.

A. Smart Select: recommends a set of ‘Best’ images from your whole repository based on the package you’ve chosen.
B. Smart Layout: automatically does all the layout work for your album
C. Smart Casting: automatically sort the images of main characters from the images set and gives priority based on it’s built in ‘Face detection’ function.

The software will now proceed to analyse your full set of images based on A, B and C and of course the package chosen.

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Once the software has done its job, heh, you will get a first-hand glance at the album.

note this is NOT the final version and you still have a lot of upcoming editing rights.

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Remember to save your project at intervals from this point onwards.

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Note: At this point, one may wish to proceed to upload the album to Fujifilm for print immediately but trust me, the amount of customisation you may wish to do now is simply: ‘everything’ so pls do spend this amount of time.

Album title.

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Album cover color

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Various Album Design selections are available, down to how the mini icons are spaced out on the album cover.

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Contrary to the belief that the Year album software forces you to use the images it selects, here’s the part which makes the software service perfect.

The software now allows:

1. Full customsation of images , all you need to do if you wish to replace a chosen image is simply drag and drop your choice into its place.

2. Further editing of each and every selected image. ‘Crop, Shift position etc etc’

3. Change of page colours.

4. And yes, additional of icons, messages and the full works to create a very much more personalised photo album.

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Yes, you can even add in your own personalised messages etc.

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What can be done is only limited by your imagination here.
 

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Once you are done, click on ‘Go to Final Check’ and have as much fun as you need coming to putting in the final touches.

Finalising.

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Sending your order to Fujifilm (straight from within the software)

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And you are done!

And the greatest Surprise? I finished everything including sending in the order in just under 40 minutes.
 

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Conclusions.

I had sent in my order on the 5th of October and it was delivered to my doorstep on the 14th of October and yeap, it’s a nice album print on Fujifilm’s high quality silver halide premium paper with lay-flat binding for easy viewing.

The only problems I encountered during the whole process was:

1. Selecting of a font type other than the base choice (Arial) wasn’t easy , (this was feedback-ed to Fujifilm)
2. The software crashed once (yes, once) hence why its important to save your work intermittently.

Disclaimer:

For the review, the cost of the album I printed for this review was sponsored by Fujfilm Asia Pacific ($39.90 worth) Frankly this is a very small sum of cost which I would have been glad to pay for myself.

The PhotoBook i received. The print and binding quality is really good.

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Thinking back, considering how much of the background work was done by the Year Album Service, it was really a quick nifty process which I enjoyed.

In general, the only thing that baffled me was that so few people knew about the Year Album Service and had a lot of misconceptions about what it could do and its my hope that my sharing can provide exposure and of course provide an alternative to you.

The Year Album service is most nifty if one wishes to do a photo book/album for trips or simply a memorable phase of life – and yes, I will use it again.

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Thank you for reading.

and remember, the Fujifilm Year Album service is just a website away at www.year-album.sg

and from this review: Promo code: YASG15 for a 15% discount :bsmilie:
 

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lovely collection Keith, thanks for sharing!
 

thanks for sharing with all the screenshots!!!!
 

no prob :) Glad u find the sharing useful.
 

Very Nice . Thanks for sharing .
 

My wife uses the apple photo book, which is similar but I guess this is easier to use! We print one book every year. Thanks for the information, maybe will try Fujifile Year Album as well. And nice pics!