Creating Picaboo Books & Cards with photos from online photo-sharing websites

Many of you have asked us how to use the photos you have shared on photo-sharing websites like Shutterfly, Ofoto, or Snapfish, in your Picaboo photo books. In many cases, your friends and family have shared their photos with you on one of these sites and now you want to use them in your Picaboo books and cards. When these websites post uploaded images, they apply heavy compression to the pictures in order to reduce the load on their servers.

Since the online photo-sharing websites compress your images, the print quality will be very poor when you use the images that are pulled directly from a slideshow or folder in your Picaboo books. Instead, it is best to use the high resolution, original digital source images in Picaboo to maximize print quality.

When you use software from these websites to automatically upload your photos to these sites when your camera is plugged into your computer, there is also a setting to save a copy of the photos on your hard drive as well. You should select that option so that you can use the copies of the original photos in your Picaboo books and cards.

As an example, the photo on the left is the low resolution version copied directly from a photo-sharing website.The photo on the right is the original high-resolution digital source image.

If you do not have the original digital images on your computer, you can retrieve the high resolution, larger size images from most online photo-sharing websites. For example, Shutterfly, Ofoto, and Snapfish let you purchase your high resolution, original size digital images on a CD. Snapfish also lets you download your high resolution photos for a fee.

Once you have the original source images on your computer, you can add them to Picaboo and begin creating your own unique photo books and cards.