Printique review: Superior quality, dated software

When it comes to photo book and calendar print quality, Printique is still unmatched. The beautiful covers and thick pages in Printique’s products are professional level, though making them is not as easy compared to the competition. Discerning customers will find it’s worth the effort as even the default photo book offering is a lay-flat design that lets you view the entirety of its gorgeous pages. But this also makes them more expensive.

We also liked Printique’s photo calendars, which are flimsier than its books, but offer excellent image quality. The company’s software has improved and includes a new fast and fun Easy Books tool, but it’s not offered for calendars, which are a challenge to create. Printique’s photo cards were mediocre with faint color, contrast and text quality. Read the rest of our Printique review to see if this premium photo printing service is worth the effort and the price, or whether you should go with another option on our list of the best photo books.

Printique review: Pricing

Printique photo books
Printique’s least expensive hardcover option is a 20-page 6 x 6-inch hardcover layflat book, which costs $67.44. There’s a variety of other options including hardcover layflat books including from 8 x 8 inches ($78.99) to 12 x 12 inches ($110.49). Softcover books are offered in 4 x 4-inches (starting at $14.99) and 8 x 8-inches ($29.99). Other styles include fabric cover books (from $48.99) and leather covered books ("vegan" and "genuine") from $83.99.

Printique calendars
A 12-month 10 x 10-inch centerfold calendar starts at $25.99, while an 18-month 10 x 10-inch calendar goes for $40.99. (6 x 6 and 8 x 8 sizes are also available.) Top-hanging 12 x 18-inch calendars start at $34.99 for 12 months, and small desktop calendars start at $15.99 (for 3.74 x 8.27 inches).

Printique photo cards
The 5 x 7 and 7 x 5 cards start at $1.75 each for 12 or more; single cards are a hefty $4.99. Printique doesn't offer metal foil text, but some card types offer rounded corners or other edge patterns for an additional fee. There are no other sizes of flat cards and no folded-card options.

Printique review: Software

Printique has made some improvements in its software since we tested it last year, but it still lags its competitors in terms of ease of use. On the plus side, beginners will find some of the design features less intimidating, particularly the new pre-set themes, which help you more easily lay out your photo book in an attractive manner.

Also handy is Printique’s new Easy Books editor, which will automatically place and design photos in your book in a few seconds. Results are varied, however. We needed to spend a few minutes moving images around to get the sequence we liked but most novices will probably be happy with the stress-free finished product.

Unfortunately, this fast design feature is limited to creating photo books. Designing calendars and photo cards with Printique’s software is still a slog with few simple automated features.

On the other hand, the software offers the most control of the services we tested, and more advanced users might prefer its precision and customization. Seasoned designers will likely appreciate the variety of rulers, gridlines, submenus, and toolbars offered in the software.

Printique doesn't provide a full tutorial to walk you through all these features, as less-complex services do, though there are how-to videos on some of the individual design features. Even better is the company’s new live chat helper, which lets users get real-time answers to their design questions from Printique’s customer service.

If you’re just getting your feet wet, there are 86 templates for photo books, which you can narrow down by category or a search function. On the other hand, there are only 11 templates for calendars. Cards come in a whopping 300 types for more than two dozen occasion categories, including wedding, baby shower, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Diwali, Valentine's Day, Mother's and Father's Day, and a range of Jewish holidays (but no Muslim events, such as Eid).

Once you get the hang of everything Printique has to offer, you can do some great things with its tools. For instance, a floating toolbar that appears when you click on a photo provides easy access to many key configuration options: panning and zooming, fitting or filling pages and spreads, and setting image opacity, among others.

The level of customization in Prinique is impressive. You can set the exact size and dimension of images, down to hundredths of an inch. Borders are also fully adjustable. Along with being able to set the color and width, you can set the border to either extend out from the photo or crop into it. The same adjustability goes for the width of drop shadows as well. All these style settings can be copied and pasted from one photo to another.

Text customization is also deep. Printique’s array of font options is grouped under detailed categories such as Serif, Sans Serif, Handwritten, Fancy, and even Hebrew-inspired. Font sizes can be tweaked in one-point increments, in fully customizable colors, with adjustable opacity. You can also configure the thickness and color of drop shadows on text, but you cannot create borders around the lettering. Finally, you can adjust the tracking (space between letters) and leading (space between lines) of text. But pay close attention to what you type, since there's no spell check — something that every other service we've tested does have.

Background design options also abound in Printique. There are 783 backgrounds in total, and they are less cutesy, and more artful than with other services. (For instance, the "Birthday" category has no hat, cake, or balloons, but rather starbursts, polka dots, and colorful brushed-metal patterns.) Where Printique stumbles is with solid colors. It offers virtually no color presets, and instead forces you to use an awkward color-picking tool that requires configuring a hue with sliders, setting the red-green-blue intensity levels, or entering a hex code. Design pros might not have a problem but pretty much everyone else will be baffled.

Printique's frames were kind of disappointing. Instead of classic frames that mimic what you might see hanging on a wall of a museum or someone’s apartment, you can pick from a very small assortment of basic frilly patterns or faux corner mounts. But most frames are actually cutouts that crop the photo into a vast selection of shapes, such as hearts, stars, or letters (if that’s your thing.) Printique offers a vast array of stickers (14,951) ranging from monochrome cutouts to childlike drawings, detailed drawings, letters, slogans, and calendar grids.

Despite its rich range of customization, Printique offers no photo-editing options or even photo filters. This is odd given the level of user it’s aimed at. You can, however, opt to have your photos auto color-corrected when you order a printing.

The design interface for calendars has some of the same tools as for books — excluding the new Easy Books feature — but we found it more challenging to use, particularly if you use the “Build your own” template. Placing photos into the calendar in this “blank slate” style was a challenge for us, with the images often overlapping with the grid of the calendar. After playing with it for about half an hour, we grew frustrated and decided instead to try one of Printique’s calendar templates, the Modern style. The result was a gorgeous, professional-looking calendar filled with our photos from a recent trip to Italy. But it wasn’t what we initially wanted, and we were disappointed we had trouble building our own calendar, which wasn’t an issue with the other services.

There are many levels of customization, even in the pre-set calendar templates. As with books, you have access to a variety of texts, backdrops, frames, and stickers. Text, backdrops, and stickers can be added to the grid pages, as well. You can also fully customize the calendar's fonts (individually by month, week, day, and event designation), change the grid's opacity and add drop shadows of any color. You can add a photo to any date square by dragging, dropping, and cropping. But you can only change the text for a particular day by going into the universal settings and choosing options for all event days. We just wish it was all a little easier to do.

There are a variety of card templates, including a “Build Your Own” option that was easier to use than the calendar version, but they are organized a bit strangely. Assuming that the most popular design would be “holiday” cards, we found it odd that these were at the bottom of the Photo Greeting Cards page. And while there were many template options for the Christmas card we created, most of the designs were a little ornate and, to our taste, intrusive on the photo. We wanted more options to make the image larger on the cards to showcase people and families, which is what most of these types of cards will feature.

One overriding issue with Printique’s software is its laggy load times, particularly if your Internet signal is not strong. Whenever we started a photo book, calendar or card project, it took a few minutes for thumbnails to show up after importing our photos. This wasn’t the case for any of the competing services we tested using the same Wi-Fi connection.

Printique review: Print quality

Printique photo books
The most distinctive thing about Printique’s books vs the competition is their very thick, rigid pages. These almost vinyl-like pages are similar to the look and feel of what you’d find in a professional wedding photo album. They’re designed to last — it’s hard to imagine them even creasing or tearing — and they feel luxurious. Similarly, even the entry-level books come with a layflat binding that prevents a furrow in the seam between pages, making this design perfect for images that span spreads. Again, this is a professional level book offering but it comes at a premium price compared to Printique’s rivals. While gorgeous, we wish there were some lower-end book options since not all customers will demand this type of high-end product.

On the other hand, we appreciated Printique’s devotion to exceptional photo printing. The pages display really well with excellent color, skin tone, contrast and sharpness/detail. We rated Printique slightly above Mixbook for photo quality. But while we liked the semi-gloss finish of the pages, which is called Luster, they are prone to glare, especially in bright light. This requires you to angle the book slightly to make out the detail in the images. The company offers three other finish options for its 8 x 8 books — Glossy, Linen, and Pebble. Its Deep Matte finish is available only for books of 10 x 10 inches or larger, and it adds $36 to the price.

Despite the glare, images are excellent. The color is rich but, at times, appeared slightly oversaturated, particularly with skin tones, which were heavy on the orange and red tones. Landscapes and cityscapes, on the other hand, looked beautiful with the color popping off the page. We also liked the results of a few black-and-white photos we included in our book, which looked dramatic without losing detail.

Printique calendars
The image quality of Printique’s calendars was, not surprisingly, on a par with its photo books. What was something of a surprise, however, was the pricing. We paid $34.99 for a 12 x 18-inch, wall hanging calendar, which was less expensive than some of the smaller calendars we ordered from the other companies. For instance, Shutterfly’s calendar costs the same price for a small 8 x 11-inch calendar, and $44.99 for a 12 x 12-inch calendar. Even better, the aforementioned Modern template we chose made our calendar look classy, with the images deliberately bleeding into the grid for a stylish effect.

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Given the outstanding print quality of the calendar, we were a little surprised with how thin the pages were, particularly the flimsy front cover. While we’re looking forward to displaying the calendar in 2024, hopefully the pages – which were the thinnest of all the calendars — survive being flipped throughout the year.

We actually thought the photo quality of our calendar was even better than the photo book. This was perhaps because the surface of the Canon HD Luster paper used for the calendar was less reflective than the coated panel of the book which, ultimately, averts oversaturation. Also, hanging on a wall, the calendar is less likely to catch glare than in a book lying flat on a table. Despite the glossy finish of the calendar-grid pages, ink and marker writing did not smudge.

Printique photo cards
Another surprise with Printique given its fabulous books and attractive calendars is how middling its photo cards were. The family on the front of our holiday card lacked sharpness and displayed a slight yellow cast on the edges of their faces. The card stock also felt flimsy, and the text was somewhat hard to read.

Overall, the card looked like something that might have been produced at home on an inkjet printer. Some of the blame might be on Printique’s default Linen finish, which affected photo sharpness and color saturation. It also made it less legible than we would have liked. Printique also offers Matte and Felt finish options for the same price, though they are unlikely to add any more pop to images.

Printique review: Verdict

Printique was, at one time, our favorite photo book service and while its print quality remains the best, the competition has caught up in other ways and they are now edged out overfall by Mixbook. For both photo books and calendars, Printique’s image quality tops its rivals. In particular, the default thick pages and layflat binding of its books make them look and feel like professional art pieces.

Even though Printique has improved its software since the last time we tested it, it’s still slow and confusing which can make their products a slog to create. Their photo books are also the most expensive of the companies we tested, and we wish they offered some less pricey options. For more advanced users and even some professional photographers though, Printique is the one we would recommend. The overall print quality is high enough to put some these relatively minor annoyances aside.

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