My fellow Fuji Guy Dale recently got married. I went to the wedding and took my trusty “pocket-rocket” X30 and took some shots from the pews where I was sat. I was hardly shooting the wedding, but it still made for a fairly interesting series of shots as the story of the traditional British Christian wedding ceremony unfolded in front of me.
Like most of the images I take for personal use, they ended up in a gallery on my Facebook wall for friends to see. But I wanted to do something a little bit more. This is where Pop Book came in…
Now I know this sounds like your usual sales pitch but it really isn’t. I heard about Pop Books from my colleagues in our printing team. For the small fee of £4.99, I was able to take 21 of my favourite images and compile them into this little cute photobook to give to Dale and his new wife as a little gift and token of my gratitude for being invited to share their day.
How does it work?
I’m pretty sure that Pop Books are mostly aimed at smartphone photographers (nothing wrong with that!) because you can only create a Pop Book by using an App for Android or Apple devices.
Once you’ve installed the App you get started by tapping “Create your POP BOOK”. You then need to choose where to get your images from. You can either browse your device, or choose either Facebook or Instagram.
I chose Facebook, logged in as me, and then selected the images from my Facebook gallery. Once you have selected 21 images you can click “Create your POP BOOK” button again and this takes you to the final stage.
You can now double tap on any picture to Edit it. You can Crop, add an instagram-style filter and add text. You can also select either a white border of black border for each of your images
Finally you can change the order that the images will appear in.
And that’s it. Just create an account and go through the basket process, and “between 10-14 days” your Pop Book should be with you. In my case it was actually 4 days.
You even get a pretty cool viewer that allows you to see the book how it will appear. You can see my book for Dale here.
And here’s the final result
…and with a shiny English pound for scale:
Tips
If you know you’re shooting for a Pop Book, set your camera to 1 : 1 ratio to help compose your shots and save any post process cropping.
You need exactly 21 images to make a Pop Book. No more. No less. Make sure you have your 21 images ready to go before you start the process as it makes it smoother. In my case, it turned out that I didn’t actually take 21 different images that I was happy with so I had to get creative with the crops to make a few very similar shots have very different final looks. It really helps to go into this thing knowing you need 21 images to start with!
Is this service EU only, or does Fujifilm plan to offer it in other markets?
Hi, thank you for your comment. Unfortunately at present the service is only offered to UK residents, however it is the intention that this will be extended into other EU countries in 2016.
Hi there,
Wow this is so interesting!
I will definitely be buying one to have in my hand bag to show people. You just never know who you may meet!
Thank you
Sarah
This app is not available in the Turkish itunes store and I suspect that it may not be available in other countries itunes store, either.
This is awesome! I love photo books so I might have to try this out. 🙂
Please make this available in Germany!