Working with your suppliers

Don't design albums your supplier can't make

Just because you can design something on your computer doesn't mean your album supplier can make it. In the real world professional photography is a team game.

You (you) need to be very clear what your supplier can and cannot do, and keep this in mind as you work.

For suppliers other than Queensberry, Photojunction is simply a tool for designing album pages. You design and export your print files with Photojunction, but the software does not create, or validate, the order that goes to the supplier.

For example the supplier you deal with may not offer matted albums. Even if they do they may not allow you to custom-design matted album layouts; may not offer Wing or Flip pages; may require a certain minimum distance between apertures in matted albums, or between an aperture and the page edge; may not allow you to display images inside the front or back covers of the album.

Page layout programs like InDesign, and most album planning software for that matter, completely ignore these problems, but Photojunction does its best to take care of the mechanics for you ... so you don't have to worry about dimensions, supplier specs, business rules etc.

Here's how it works.

Album resources

The purpose of Photojunction's Album Resources and Lab Settings is to stop you wasting time. There's no point ordering albums that can't be made because your design, specifications and/or files don't comply with vendor requirements.

How comprehensive the resources are depends on the specific supplier.

For most vendors they simply specify essential basics like page dimensions and page type.

However Queensberry's album resources are so smart that you can be pretty sure even your first album order will be ready to go straight into production.

Remix DIY

Remix DIY Album Resources are designed to help you create flushmount albums using vendors who don't actively support Photojunction. All you need to do is enter a page height and width, which you can save for future use. Don't forget to add the vendor's recommended trim allowance.