Fotobook gripe
I've been compiling a photo album of all the best of my digi-photos from 2007. I decided to use the Fotobook software to create the book (can be done offline, unlike Photobox who I have used before), which you then upload to their website and they print the book and post it to you.
The book hasn't arrived yet. I'll comment on the photo quality when it does.
But I am annoyed by their software. It ate all the free space on my hard disk. Before I started working on the book, there was 19Gb of free space on my 'C' drive. I saved the file to the desktop. As I added photos (about 280 of them) the thing grew to a whopping 1.8Gb. But still nowhere near enough to clog up the hard drive.
Last weekend, while saving a near-final version of the book, the computer gave me a 'stream writing error' warning. I had a look and discovered that the hard drive was full! A bit of snooping lead me to the discovery of over ten '.tmp' files, each well over 1Gb in size, buried away in a temp directory. The Fotobook software doesn't delete its temp files! And everytime you use it it creates a new file rather than over-writing a previous one.
That is really sloppy.
The book hasn't arrived yet. I'll comment on the photo quality when it does.
But I am annoyed by their software. It ate all the free space on my hard disk. Before I started working on the book, there was 19Gb of free space on my 'C' drive. I saved the file to the desktop. As I added photos (about 280 of them) the thing grew to a whopping 1.8Gb. But still nowhere near enough to clog up the hard drive.
Last weekend, while saving a near-final version of the book, the computer gave me a 'stream writing error' warning. I had a look and discovered that the hard drive was full! A bit of snooping lead me to the discovery of over ten '.tmp' files, each well over 1Gb in size, buried away in a temp directory. The Fotobook software doesn't delete its temp files! And everytime you use it it creates a new file rather than over-writing a previous one.
That is really sloppy.
2 Comments:
Did you receive the book? How was it? Did you like it more than Photobox one?
Yes, sorry I never made a follow up comment.
The piture quality is slightly better than the Photobox one. But that's not to say the Photobox one was bad in any way, the only complaint I had against the quality of the Photobox book was the supposedly black text under the photos came out as being grey.
Having said that, I recently got a 'stylebook' from Photobox and it is excellent.
Comparing the two hardback books, the Fotobook one is better quality than the Photobox one, but did cost a tenner more, so you probably just get what you pay for.
Both are recommended. But I won't be trying to create a big Fotobook again due to the hard disc usage issues.
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