I can’t remember the last time I saw a photo album. Actually I can, it was at a family gathering recently where it’s a customary act to pull out the ancient, dust-covered tomes that have baby pictures of my siblings and I. Great fun. But what I realised from that altogether embarrassing moment is that despite living in the modern technological era, nothing beats the tangibility of a leather covered photo album. But developing your photos, finding a great, musty smelling album and putting it all together is quite a stretch if you’re a sloth.
Here’s where Picsati comes in. Picsati is an online platform where you can upload your digital photos, customise an album and then have that album delivered to your doorstep. I decided to look into the Picsati website.
Going on Picsati, I hit the big button to start my photo book, which I guess is the modern term for albums, and was on my way to creating my album. First off I started by choosing a square album as the shape for my album, the other option being rectangular. Next was the size, there are three dimensions available, all differing in price. I could go large with 30 cm by 30 cm, medium sized with 25 cm by 25 cm or I could go miniscule with 20 cm by 20 cm. Well I say miniscule, it’s still quite large. The prices in order are AED 239, AED 177 and AED 125. With the size and shape of the album out of the way, next comes the decision that will have you spend countless nights awake: should your wedding album have a hard cover, a soft cover or a fabric cover? I went with the fabric cover and was given a choice of colours to choose from: black, burgundy, light blue or white. The customisation process still has one step left and that’s to choose the orientation of the album, do you want it to be viewed from left to right or do you want it to be viewed from right to left.
Next you’ll either have to sign up, sign in with an existing account or sign in with your Facebook account. Once you’ve logged in, you’re given a range of themes to choose from, with previews of how different pages in your album will appear depending on the theme you chose. I went with the “modern” theme, started uploading a random catalog of pictures I had and then proceeded to spend the next 30 minutes deciding in which order the pictures would appear in the album. A further 10 minutes was devoted to choosing which of the pictures would be prominently featured on the front cover of the album. My creative juices started flowing once I realised that while a preset theme was chosen by you, you could edit said theme and start throwing in frames, speech bubbles, change the layout of pictures on pages and so forth. Suffice to say, an hour and half later I was done composing my album of cat pictures.
Proceeding to checkout, I was asked how many albums I’d need (I decided one cat album was enough), the type of paper (glossy or matte), whether I wanted a gift box as well (priced at AED 19) and lastly if I wanted a low resolution copy of the album sent to me by email. Checking everything except the low resolution copy, the grand total (with the regular delivery fees) came to AED 276 which could be paid by credit card. Or if at the end of designing my album I decided to not have it printed for me, I could instead choose to pay a total of AED 37 to have a high resolution copy of the album emailed to me for me to print myself. For the former method, the regular delivery time is a week, or you could opt for an express delivery which is priced at AED 45 and is delivered in 3 days.
As far as custom albums come, Picsati certainly stands out, though I do wish they had a greater selection of themes for me to play around with, that said it certainly is one of the best album design services in the region.
