Photo Books as a Frugal Wedding Album

When my wife and I got married we spent a lot on our photography.   That was one of our priorities for the wedding to have nice photos that would last.  So we chose to spend more on photos.   One of the things we bought was a professionally made photo album.   Photo albums from professional photographers can easily run several hundred dollars.   Costhelper cites medium prices for hand crafted wedding photo albums at $250 to $450 range.

You can easily get very nice alternatives to the wedding photo albums sold by the photographers and same yourself a lot of money.

A friend of mine was pretty  frugal with their wedding.  They had a friend take pictures and then got prints made online.   For their wedding album they got a hardcover photo book made.   The photo book is actually quite nice.  

Photo Books Options

The photo book my friend got came from Kodak.   To make such a book you upload your photos to the service's website then select the options you want for your book.   The photo books start with a certain number of pages (20 for larger books) but if you want more pages you can pay additional for extra.  You can get a good size hardcover starting around $25-$30 or a smaller softcover for $10-$15.


Snapfish has 8 x 11 hardcover books starting with 20 pages for $30.  Or a 5 x 7 softcover with 20 pages is $12.  See:  Snapfish photo books for more details on prices.

Kodak Gallery has a 9 x 10 hardcover with 20 pages for $30.   Their 5 x 5.75 paperback with 14 pages starts at $10.   See: Kodak photo book prices.

My Publisher via Costco  Costco members get 20% off of orders on My Publisher.    They sell an 11.25 x 8.75 hardcover with 20 pages for $30.   The 7.75 x 5.75 paperback has 20 pages for $12.95.   See base prices at My Publisher   

You can also check Retailmenot for promo codes with the following links  Snapfish codes, Kodak Gallery codes & My Publisher codes.

Build Your Own Traditional Album

 Rather than buying a photo book you could assemble your own traditional photo album to use as your wedding album.   There are a number of relatively inexpensive wedding photo albums for sale online.

I found the site AlbumSource.com which has a variety of nice albums.   Their Classic Wedding Scrapbook is 10 x 12 with 40 sheets for $35.00.   You could fill that with 20 8x10's and 60 4x6's from Snapfish for around 65 in print costs. So the total cost for such an album with pictures would be around $100.  

If your building your own album like this then it would help to have some artistic capabilities.