4.5 Out of 5

Picaboo is a free program that lets you create and customize your own photo books and cards. How does it measure up?

With Picaboo, downloading the software, creating your custom photo books and/or cards, and sharing them with others are all free (and, admittedly, a lot of fun). The part that will cost you something is ordering the physical books and cards.

Let’s start at the beginning: Downloading Picaboo can take several minutes, depending on your connection. Once the software is on your computer it will take another few minutes to download a library of backgrounds and themes. It will also ask you to create your free Picaboo account.

Once everything is set up you can get right to work. Creating your first photo book or card is a simple, step-by-step process:

First, you just pick from your two main options: Book or Card. We’ll start with a book. The next step is to select a theme to work around. There are baby themes, holiday themes, wedding, storybook – you name it. If you don’t find the one you’re looking for, though, you can go to Picaboo’s website and download some more for free.

Once that’s settled, the next step is to select the photos you want to use. Then you can choose to let Picaboo auto-fill your book with the selected photos, which you can then rearrange, or to arrange your book manually, page by page. Each has its advantage: letting Picaboo do it saves you a lot of work, but doing it manually gives you a lot of control over each page’s layout.

After you’ve chosen whether to go auto or manual, you’ll be asked to name your album. At this point, if you took the auto route, you’ll get to start customizing everything else, like your book’s cover, text, and other options. If you went manual, you’ll start at the same place, but you’ll also have to choose layouts and photos for each page as you work.

Once all the hard work (a.k.a. the fun part) is finished, you get to share your book with friends and family, or to order a physical copy. In order to share, your friends and family have to sign up for a Picaboo account, and then you have to add each other as “Pals”. They don’t have to download the software, but if they do they can order their own copies of your books and cards.

We ordered one 7×5 card, which cost $2.49, plus $0.99 shipping, making the total $3.48. There was also a bracket for taxes, but none were applied to this order.

Picaboo is simple because it has a single focus – making personalized photo books and cards. It makes no attempt at being a photo organizer or editor. It does have options for red eye removal, brightness and contrast, but any other image editing or manipulation will have to be done with another program before loading it into Picaboo. The shape of your photo is also determined by the page layout, not the actual size and shape of the photo. This means that if you load a horizontal image into a vertical space, it will crop the photo to fit into the vertical space. You can accommodate for this by changing the layout. However, if you prefer, you can just zoom in or out and move the picture in all directions to make it fit in the space.

Conclusion: 4.5 out of 5

Picaboo is a simple program for making straightforward scrapbooks/photobooks and cards. It’s great to use for scrapbooking if you want the background paper and image layout established, but want to physically add your own details and embellishments, or if you want it pretty clean and simple. It’s not so great if you want a hardcore scrapbooking program, though. If you’re more interested in making personalized cards, whether for holidays, birthdays, or just for fun, then Picaboo has some great options and styles.

The Picaboo software is free and can be downloaded here.