This summer, our friends showed us a lovely bound photobook of our shared holiday to the Grand Canyon last year done on a MacBook or iMac desktop using iPhoto.

It was a spectacular creation.

We are hybrid iPhone and PC people.

And rarely turn on our PC albatross unless required by local authorities or Budget Night.

Ugh.

You want to make a photo book the lazy, way with your phone but how?

Most apps like Mosaic and Shutterfly only allow 20 photos.

20

Enough for a child’s birthday party but an entire holiday?

I have to choose between Heirloom market tomatoes, Roman ruins or dear friends in front of the Alps?

Enter Line Camera app collages or Tripix app.

Ah, clever girl.

Put similar objects together in a collage, leave pages for people.

Odd numbers of photos in a collage  are pleasing to the eye and you can get a lot more real estate on the teensy 8×8″ page.

Now you can put many more photos on a page and contrast with a single photo.

Shutterfly also has coupons, so an 8×8″ hardcover book might only be $15USD instead of $30.

I’ll also look at the Mosaic app whose desktop mother is highly recommended for PC users.

Two more apps to play with are the Photobooks app by Simpleprints and Tripix by Shutterfly. Simpleprints allows captions on pages and the spine. The Tripix layouts are really nice and allow up to 4 photos per page and editing.

In the meantime, if you want to capture summer in a small book quickly, consider:

*Collages in Line Camera

*Shutterfly, Tripix or Mosaic apps

*Retailmenot.com or the app for promo codes

I’m still lamenting that the apps don’t seem to allow a lot of text, stickers and other fun things. I may need a good pen and stickers…

I’ll let you know my final verdict…