You know what I miss? Photo albums. I miss flipping through their pages to rediscover memories, and slotting in new pictures. For all the convenience of instant uploads and sharing, my interaction with cloud-stored pictures tends to dissolve right after the first time I upload and share. (A November 2014 survey by self-publishing site Shutterfly suggests the same.)

Photo Bulk for Mac is a lightweight application that lets you easily add a watermark to an image. You just need to drag and drop your image into the app, choose the watermark type from the menu, modify the settings to your choices, and you are good to go. Who the Google Photos app is for Google Photos is an incredibly useful photo-backup service that any iPhone owner could take advantage of. Owners of smaller-capacity devices will find it extra-useful.

That's why, for me, a photo book or calendar or heck, even a mug customized with someone's mug on it, makes the perfect gift, a way to hold on to those memories just a little bit longer.

I make a fair number of these little gifts using online services. I thought I'd share my experiences with four publishing sites that I've successfully used for creating photo books: Shutterfly and Mixbook for straightforward photo items; Blurb for a text-heavy book; and Pint Size Productions for the cooing, diapered crowd. I usually stick with the desktop sites, though most also have streamlined mobile apps as well. (Mac users can also create books using iPhoto.)

Just a note that since I first published this piece, some prices have gone up. Keep an eye out for frequent deals. And as always, feel free to jump in with favorites and perspectives of your own.

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1. Shutterfly: The classic

Shutterfly was the first digital service I ever used to store my pictures in the cloud. These days, I turn to it more for photo gifts. It has an extensive offering that ranges from books and calendars to stationary and candles: basically anything you can slap a picture on.

Design options
If you start on the Custom Path, you'll have over 200 themes to choose from and up to six different cover choices (including leather and crushed silk), while Simple Path has about 20 template styles options and keeps the covers simple.

Ease of use
This website is more visually confusing than other sites, and you have to choose from various options right off the bat. The easiest one auto-fills photos for you, which you can move around the pages at will. You can loop in photos from sites like Picasa and Facebook, as well as from your computer. Once the photos are in, it's easy to change the layout for the entire book. You can open a bird's-eye view to swap pictures, though dragging and dropping them around would be easier still.

Simple Path is more constraining. You won't be able to change photo sizes or layouts, though you can remove and rotate pictures. You can convert Simple Path to a custom book through drop-down controls, which saves you from reuploading your snaps.

2. Mixbook: The new kid

Mixbook has a more modern website than Shutterfly's, but also has fewer options. In addition to books, you can make calendars and cards.

Design options
The roughly 200 themes to choose from are broken down into categories.

Ease of use
The site is cleaner to behold and easier to navigate than Shutterfly's in terms of narrowing down designs by category. Adding photos is as simple as dragging and dropping from your computer, though you can upload and auto-fill as well. From the desktop site, you can upload photos directly from your computer or through third-party services.

I do like how clearly marked tabs make changing layouts and backgrounds extremely simple, and backgrounds and stickers are modern and attractive.

One edge that Mixbook has is an ability for multiple collaborators to edit, which is useful if photos are spread out among family members or friends.

Price
Ranging from $16 to $70, Mixbook's prices edge Shutterfly's, and ordering extra pages is more economical. (Deluxe covers will cost much more, of course.) Additional pages are cheaper than Shutterfly's, ranging from 50 cents per page to $1.50 per page for the largest.

Yea or nay?
The photo books look good, though you'll need to pay attention to full-bleed photos whose edges will be obscured in a gutter. The title on the front cover of my book came out darker than I expected, and was shifted more to the left than I thought. Reorders and edits are straightforward after you log back in to your account. Overall, Mixbook's smoother creation experience and competitive prices make it a winner.

3. Blurb: The overachiever

Blurb is a site for the more serious self-publisher. I turned to it when making a memory book that was almost more text than pictures. Blurb was the most flexible of the bunch in terms of large swaths of text. It also turned out to be the most frustrating to use.

Design options
When it comes to luxury paper choices, Blurb has the competition trounced. You can download graphical themes in free packs of 20, but by default you're literally working with a blank canvas. Plenty of templates help you get started on layouts, and there are tools for drawing and adding text much like a more traditional desktop publishing app.

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Ease of use
The most powerful tool for those who want to control every detail, Blurb is also by far the hardest for casual book-makers to use. You start by downloading a separate app, BookWright, for Mac or the PC (or install the Blurb plug-in for desktop apps like InDesign). After that, placing words and art are up to you. You can insert photos from your computer, but there's no integration with third-party photo sources.

The biggest problem for my book of short stories and memories was in formatting the text to make it fit just so. Any update to the text also changed the ways the words laid out on the page. This made copy editing and proofreading frustratingly slow.

On the plus side, you can easily create a PDF or an e-book for the iPad.

Price
If you're choosing fancy paper, prices can skyrocket, but for the more basic binding, you're looking at $13 for a 7x7 softcover book of 20 pages, up to $50 for a 13x11-inch book, this time with a hard cover.

Yea or nay?
This was the only service I found that gave me the flexibility to make the text-heavy mix of stories and captioned photos that I wanted.

However, my Blurb book arrived with unwelcome surprises. A small logo at the top and bottom of each page woun

1. Shutterfly: The classic

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2. Mixbook: The new kid

3. Blurb: The overachiever

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