For many years, I used my Mac’s built-in iPhoto, and more recently Photos, software to create hardcover books full of pictures that I had taken over the last year or some other period of time. A book of pictures of my kids over the last year was always a perfect Christmas present for my parents. Apple discontinued its photo printing service in September 2018, so last year I had to select a third-party service to create these books. The ones that I looked at most closely were Motif and Mimeo, both of which worked within the Photos app on a Mac and did a pretty good job of recreating the experience that you used to get from Apple. I ultimately decided to use Motif, and it worked great. Over the past year or so I’ve created four books using Motif on my Mac, and every one came out great.
On October 1, 2019, Motif released an iOS app so that you can now create picture books completely on your iPad. (You could also use an iPhone, but that screen is so small that I think it makes far more sense to use an iPad.) The company offered to let me print a free book so that I could try out the service and prepare this review. We are just a few months away from the beginning of Mardi Gras season in New Orleans, and for many decades I have enjoyed getting together with friends and family to celebrate so I have tons of pictures — especially from more recent years when I have had kids to take to parades. Thus, to do a realistic test of Motif, I decided to create a book full of Mardi Gras pictures over the years. With one exception that I’ll note at the end, the process went very well, and I actually found a lot to like about creating a picture book on an iPad. Indeed, when it is time for me to create my annual end-of-the-year book with pictures of my kids, I’m now planning to use the Motif iPad app instead of my computer.
Creating a book
You start the process in the Motif app by selecting a product. I selected Hardcover Photo Books, but you can also create softcover books, and soon you will also be able to create calendars and photo wall tiles.
Next, you select a size for your book. Almost every time that I have created a book using the former Apple service or Motif, I’ve created a large 13" x 10" book. The larger book size is more expensive but makes it easier to see pictures when you have multiple pictures on a single page, and when you have a single picture take up a full 13" x 10" page, it looks stunning. But the other sizes are 11" x 8.5", 10" x 10", and 8" x 8".
The next step is to select an image source. Motif lets you select from Memories (automatically created by Photos) or from your Albums. If you already have an album of photos to use, then you are ready to go. For my project, before I even started using the Motif app, I used my iPad’s built-in Photos app to add pictures to an album created for this book. Because I was selecting the best pictures from around two decades of pictures, this process actually took me a while to do, but it was fun to travel down memory lane as I curated the pictures.
Note that, for some of the picture selection process, I used Photos on my desktop iMac computer instead of my iPad. I was going through a very large number of pictures, and that process was often easier with the big 27" screen of my iMac and a mouse. But I also selected many of the pictures on my iPad, and I certainly could have selected them all that way.
Once you have selected an album of photos — whether it is an album that you already had or one that you created specifically for the book — Motif will then analyze the quality of the pictures, including looking for duplicates. Motif will then select what it thinks are the best pictures to include in your book. Using a slider at the bottom, you can tell Motif how many pictures to include in the book and it will adjust its recommendations accordingly. And of course you can manually tap pictures to include or exclude them from the book.
Next, you select a theme for the book. There are currently 14 themes in the app. My favorite is called Image Conscious because it has no margins and allows each picture to be as large as possible within a thin frame on the page.
Next, you are presented with your book. Motif automatically puts pictures on pages for yo. Some pages have just one picture, some have multiple pictures. The pictures are roughly in chronological order, but not completely. You can view two pages of pictures at a time.
At this point, you could just tap the Checkout button and order the book. But my guess is that you will want to rearrange the pictures and change the templates of individual pages (how many pictures are on each page, and whether you also have words next to the pictures). You can also add more pages to the book. When you are adding a page or changing a template, you first tell Motif how many pictures you want to have on the page, and then you select from a wide variety of templates that work for that many pictures.
I have one complaint about working with templates. You cannot add just a single page within a book. You have to add two pages at a time. I understand the reasoning for this because it means that a picture that you selected to be closer to the outside edge of the book versus closer to the inside seam doesn’t change places when you add pages, but I still wish that the app let me make the decision to do this anyway.
Once you have your page template set, you can pick the pictures to place into the template. Using the Images button at the bottom, you can see all of the pictures that were selected but not yet used in your book (to avoid you using the same picture twice), or you can view all images, or you can view all images already placed. You can also add more images to the project from your Photos library.
This part of the process worked particularly well on the iPad. It is easy to pinch your fingers to zoom individual pictures so that just the best part of the picture fills the frame, making that process better than using a zoom slider on a computer. I also liked that the iPad is so portable. I could get in a comfortable spot on my couch to edit my book, and when I wanted to get a second opinion, it was easy to take my iPad to wherever my wife was located to solicit advice.
For the hardcover book, in addition to the pages in the book and the cover, you also get a book jacket with inside flaps. The cover of the book jacket is the same as the cover of the book, but you can add extra pictures and/or text to the inside flaps.
Once you have all the pages in your book the way that you want them, tap the checkout button. Motif will analyze your book and will give you a warning if you have individual pictures that are going to be a little blurry because the picture quality is low and you have them very large on a page. I got quite a few of those warnings for the older pictures in my Mardi Gras book because some of those old pictures are just scans of old photographs. But I decided to use those pictures anyway because of the memories that they contained, even if they were not very sharp, and that turned out to be the right decision.
Next you get to the payment page. The book that I selected came with 20 pages for $49.99, and each additional page was an additional $1.49. You can choose to ship economy (6-11 business days), standard (4-9 business days) or expedited (5 business days).
The final product
I placed my order on October 27, 2019, and it shipped just a few days later on October 30, 2019. The quality of the book was just as good as other books that I have ordered from Motif in the past using my computer, and just as good as books that I previously ordered using the service that Apple used to provide. (I’ve heard that this is not a coincidence and that the same printing service handled both, but whether that is true or not, all that matters to me is that the quality is the same.) The pages are thick, the photo quality is fantastic, and the book looks incredibly professional.
The one printing error
Unfortunately, however, there was one printing error. One of the pictures in the book was of my son wearing a fireman costume on Mardi Gras Day in 2009. The picture looked fine in the Motif iPad app, as you can see above. But in the book, the picture is rotated 90º counter-clockwise.
I decided that this was a good thing because it gave me an opportunity to test Motif’s customer service. I contacted Motif using their website on November 3, 2019. I received a response the next day, asking me for more information about my order, which I provided. Then on November 5, 2019, I received another email offering to reprint my book for free.
I then started a series of emails with customer service asking if I could do anything different this time since the picture was in the correct orientation in the app, just not in the printed book. I ultimately decided to follow their instructions and printed the book a second time … and again, the photo was turned 90º. After subsequent emails, Motif alerted me that there is a technical problem with my specific photo, and after some investigation I think that they are correct about there being some issue with my image file, even though the photo looks fine on my Mac, my iPad, my iPhone, and in the Motif app. I should be able to create a new version of the photo, use it in the Motif app, and print the book again and I presume that will fix the problem, but I haven’t done this yet. (And with the holidays right around the corner, I didn’t want to wait any longer before posting this review.) [UPDATE 12/13/19: After this review was posted, I did create a new version of the photo, used the coupon code Motif gave me to print the book again, and the version I received today is perfect. Also, today I received a different book that I created using Motif (that I paid for) and it is also perfect.]
Having said that, throughout the customer service process, Motif was great to deal with. The grammar used by their support staff is not perfect — clearly, English is not their native tongue — but I had no trouble understanding what they told me. I almost always got responses within 24-48 hours, and while faster responses would have been better, that seemed reasonable.
Moreover, this is not the first time that I have had a problem with a printed book. About 8 years ago, I printed a book using Apple’s former service and the colors on one of the pages were incorrect, as if too much blue was used (or not enough of some other color). Apple ultimately sent me a new book, although it meant that I had to give the “bad” book as a Christmas present and then I swapped it out for the “good” book after New Year’s.
Suffice it to say that if you are planning to order a Motif book for Christmas, you should do so soon.
Conclusion
Because I have used Motif and the similar Apple product for many years, I understood how the Motif app on the iPad was going to work. But even if this had been the first time that I had created a book, this app is easy enough to use that I would have had no trouble creating my first book. Because I use Apple’s iCloud Photos feature, all of my photos are available on my iMac, iPad, or iPhone. If you use this feature as well, then you already have access on your iPad to every photo that you might want to use in a book. Because the iPad makes it so easy to get work done anyplace, I found it really nice to use Motif in an iPad app instead of on a desktop computer. I did have that one problem with my printed book, and I do wish that Motif’s quality check in the iPad app could have discovered this issue before I printed the book. Nevertheless, Motif was very quick to give me a promotional code to reprint the book for free, and I don’t believe that their customer support folks had any idea that I was writing a review for a website, so I presume that they would treat all customers the same way.
If you are interested in turning your digital photos into a beautiful book that you can hold in your hands and easily share with friends and family, the Motif service is great. And now that they have an iPad app, you can use a very portable device with a touchscreen interface, which works very well for this type of project. If you are creating books to give as gifts for the holidays, you will want to act quickly to make sure that your book is printed in time. But whenever you are ready to make a book, the Motif app is a great way to do it.
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