Solentro - make your own photo book or posterReviews of solentro.com

The prices are very high in comparison to competitors, and with paperbacks, you can only buy ten books at a time. Otherwise, the website is easy to use and the shipping is quite fast. Overall an OK experience using Solentro.

The book format in hard cover and quality of printing is excellent however the images and type are not centered on the page although they are set up centered on the book creating software. (A full page image prints with a white bar on the outer edge of the page. It seems that the software does not consider bleed in the internal spine of the pages.

The Solentro site was user friendly and all was good until production. I needed this for a birthday gift and shipping to the US. The site says 1-2 weeks, but I did not know if that included ship time. The site does not give any details about shipment method or shipment time, so I asked customer service. They could not give me that information either. (?) I asked if I could pay extra for expedited production and/or shipment. They do not offer that and said they would mark my order as "pressing". It was produced in the normal timeframe. There is no visibility online regarding production progress, ship date or ship method (thus no way to calculate arrival date), but, thankfully, they did provide tracking information upon request. I now appreciate even more the US companies that are able to produce and ship in a matter of a few days, plus I can see online exactly when/how my package has been shipped and will be delivered. Solentro produces a nice product, but the production and shipping information and timeframe could be improved.

I found the text pages easy to use, however I must agree with another reviewer who said that creating the cover for the book was confusing. The cover sheet that I typed my title on had a design on half the page yet I now think that the cover of my book will be all blank on top with the tile below the middle which will look very awkward. I thought this design would be on the cover since the other text pages were blank. I'll just have to wait and see.

Shouldn't charge to take Solentro promotional messages off of the book.

The final product was satisfactory, in particular the reproductions of the photos selected for the book. I was somwhat disappointed about the first and final pages, as it was not clear to me how they would appear behind the clear front and back covers chosen. Had I realized this, I would have chosen a photo to be on the front page. I also could not tell when typing into the pages that the type would be as large as it was, and could have gotten some poems on one page rather than two. However, the quality of the printing and the paper was very good. I found the entry of information a bit awkward as I had to go the the revew each time I wanted to see how it actually laid out on the page, which was time consuming, as it did not display the same way when entering it. I would have like to be able to move the pages around, but found that in order to revise the order of the pages, I had to delete and add a page and retype all over again in order to place it in a different order.

I thought the editing options were limited. The compounds were separated on two line instead of moving the entire word to the next line. Not very cost effective for one book.