Mosaic photo books: the fastest, easiest way to create a photo book

With the advent of smart phones, it has gotten way too easy to take a photo!  Nowadays, I probably take more photos in a month than I did in a whole year, ten years ago.  Everyone I know has tons of photos on their phones, and for the most part, those photos end up taking permanent residence on that phone, so no one ever gets to admire them.

One great solution to get those photos off your phone and in front of admiring friends and family would be to create photo books from your favorite photos.  But I have to admit -- even with autocreate software, it takes me ages to create photo books because I'm always tweaking the layout, captions, background decor, photos, etc...  I know the software can do it all for me, but I'm such a control freak that I just have to meddle!

Sometimes it's nice to get all of those decisions out of the way, and that's just what the Mosaic photo app does.  Mosaic creates photo books out of 20 photos on your phone -- all you have to do is select the photos, and Mosaic does the rest.  Each 7x7 inch book costs a flat $20, with $4 shipping.  You don't even need to create a Mosaic account (thank goodness, that's one less password to remember).  Ours arrived in just 5 days, and it turned out gorgeous.

Seriously, the hardest part about creating a Mosaic book is selecting the photos that you want to appear.  You'll need to pick out 20 photos, no more, no less.  Just tap on the photo you want, and it will appear in the bottom bar.  You can change the order that your photos will appear by dragging and dropping.  When you're done, select "Next", and your Mosaic book is created.  That's it!

On the very first page, Mosaic showcases out a selection of your photos in a beautiful collage.  The selection and layout is random but if you don't like what appears you can reshuffle the photos and try your luck. Your 20 photos appear on pages 2 thru 21, one photo per page.

There's no zooming or cropping: Mosaic will print the photos on the pages in their original proportion (which means that if you want the largest possible photo, use square photos!).

Many people don't like the 20-photo restriction, but I actually don't mind it.  I worked around it by using a photo collage!

Pretty much the only thing users can do is select the photos, select the order of the photos, and select the background color (black or white).  No tweaking, so meddling.  It takes less than 5 minutes.

I do wish that users could add captions to the photos (I don't need fancy banners or stickers, just plain text would be great!), and I do wish that users could choose from two or three sizes (maybe 7x7, 12x12, 20x20?).   But I do get it: simplicity does have its trade-offs, and there is beauty in simplicity: you can't beat that clean, uncluttered look.   It takes so little effort and time, you just want to keep creating Mosaic books!



Disclosure: I received a code to create a free Mosaic photo book for review purposes.. The views and opinions expressed here are my own.
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