Review: Polaroid My Memories Suite - Digital Photo Album / Scrapbooking Software

Polaroid My Memories Suite is outstanding digital photo album and scrapbooking software that excels at producing high quality photo books. Just released in Dec 2009 is Version 2.0 with over 1500 background papers, 1300+ embellishments, 20 new templates, a new Resource Gallery that lets you drag and drop pictures, embellishments, shapes, backgrounds and more directly onto your layout. There is also a new Photo Wizard to help you assemble your book quickly and easily. Other new features include Word Art, giving you the ability to type text around your pictures and shapes, plus the ability to type text directly on the canvas and zoom in on your page. SAVE 15% - use PROMO CODE: GMS15off - good until 5/31/10

Professional Scrapbook Templates and Photo Books

Unlike most other photo book or scrapbooking programs and services reviewed here, My Memories Suite software does not come free with a registered account. However, its set of user-friendly tools and editing features, the quality of the professionally designed templates and high caliber printing of professional looking photo books make it well worth the $39.97 investment. In addition to creating photo books, the software can be used for multi-media slide shows and digital scrapbooking, you can add music and video clips, web links and create calendars and greeting cards.

One of the most popular uses of My Memories Suite is to chronicle family life and kids' development and preserve family memories. With today's busy schedules, people don't have time or patience for a long learning curve. This software is ideal for this purpose. Polaroid My Memories Suite is designed to be easy to use, even for novices, and offers an extensive user guide and FAQ. Once I downloaded the software, I found the interface straightforward and pretty self-explanatory and I was ready to go.

While you can make scrapbook pages with photo software such as Photoshop Elements, My Memories Suites enables you to design an complete scrapbook album and add and arrange your pages all in one workspace. Being an InDesign and Photoshop user, I missed the ability to set ruler guides, although My Memories Suite has a menu option to align images to the left, right, center horizontally or vertically, space objects equally, align to center, as well as the capability of aligning to the x-y axis at specific points.

Digital Scrapbook Page Templates

The professionally designed scrapbooking templates are one of the best features of My Memories Suite. The software comes with a series of templates by digital scrapbook designers that stand far above many found with other photo book services.

Download Additional Digital Scrapbook Embellishments, Background Papers and Designs

You can download new designs, embellishments and templates created by top scrapbook designers. Some are free and others are low cost. You can search their "Design Shop" by Designer, Category or Design Type.

My Memories Suite templates also give you lots of flexibility. Most template page elements such as backgrounds, graphic embellishments, and picture boxes can be rearranged, duplicated, resized, or deleted.

Photo Scrapbook Book Options

There are pre-designed templates that you can choose to "fast fill" with photos in seconds or make your own photo book creations using templates, embellishments and backgrounds. Photo books can be ordered hardbound or softbound with a choice of photo, leather, or linen covers. Softbound books are available with photo cover only. Wire-O (similar to spiral binding) is also offered. There are four sizes available, 6x6, 8x8, 8/5 x 11 portrait or landscape, and 12x12 for a 26-page book. Additional pages can be added for 50 cents per page.

Photo Book Quality

Polaroid My Memories Suite provides extremely high quality photo developing and photo book printing on acid-free archival quality paper. The average production time is 7 days.

Digital Scrapbooks

You can create unique digital scrapbooks enhanced with music, narration, video and with web links. Scrapbook pages can be shared via iPod or turned into greeting cards or calendars.

View a 1-minute video showing My Memories Suite's features:

Should You Buy it?

Polaroid My Memories Suite is so versatile and easy to use, you'll be up and creating scrapbooks and photo books in no time. A real advantage is the ability to design your book on your computer, rather than the having the mess of cutting and gluing, or the slowness of online photo book software, and then upload your creation and order your photo books when ready. The software is downloadable (the file is about 489MB so it may take a while if you have a slower internet connection) or you can get it on CD. You'll need about 700MB of hard drive space.

My Memories Suite $39.97 ORDER NOW! - plus Use PROMO CODE: FREEDOM15 and save 15% thru July.

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