Experiments with Lightroom and MagCloud

<p>For those who don't know it, MagCloud provides a way of printing one-off magazines, with a photo quality not as good as a real book (using, say, Blurb), but much better than a laser printer. And, it's incredibly cheap, at about 16 or 20 cents a page (more for giant page sizes). For example, you can print one copy of a 36-page 8.5x11 book for about $7.50, compared to $26 for a Blurb book. A very small (say, 8 page) MagCloud book costs $1.60, whereas the minimum page count for Blurb is 20, at $22.</p>

<p>I use MagCloud for printing up memory books of vacation snapshots, old family photos, and the like, for myself and to give away to friends and family. (I'd never use it for my serious photography.) My books are really small, generally 8 - 16 pages.</p>

<p>There are two ways to prepare the PDF to upload to MagCloud from Lightroom: As a Book, or as a Print job. MagCloud has a good document about using the Lightroom book module: <a href="http://blog.magcloud.com/2012/07/25/how-to-create-a-magcloud-ready-pdf-in-lightroom-4/">http://blog.magcloud.com/2012/07/25/how-to-create-a-magcloud-ready-pdf-in-lightroom-4/</a>. The chief difficulty is that the book (Blurb) print sizes don't match the MagCloud sizes, even though MagCloud is now owned by Blurb, but the document suggests you let MagCloud scale the pages up, and near as I can tell that works OK.</p>

<p>I found the Book Module fine for photos without captions, but it does a terrible job of positioning captions automatically, and going photo-by-photo for a book of dozens or hundreds of photos is way too much work.</p>

<p>For lots of photos with captions, using Lightroom's Print module is easier. (I just made a 36-page book with 136 photos that way.) You can size the print page to exactly match MagCloud's specifications. (On Windows, the CutePDF driver gives you more flexibility in this regard than Windows 10's built-in PDF facility. On the Mac it's no problem.) I found two issues:</p>

<p>1. There's a long-standing bug in Lightroom where it doesn't show multi-line captions until you jigger the page by, for example, checking and unchecking the Keep Square checkbox. You have to do this on each page with a multiline caption.</p>

<p>2. Unlike the Book module, the Print module provides no way to supply front and back covers. I prepared them separately in Photoshop, and then assembled the three PDFs (front cover, body from the Print module, and back cover) into a single PDF. On a Mac, the Preview app can do this directly. On Windows, if you don't have a suitable app, you can do it in Photoshop with some trouble (create a PDF Presentation) or get the free PDFSAM (PDF Split and Merge) which works perfectly, near as I can tell.</p>

<p>The Print Module does do two nice things: It produces a very compact PDF, and it automatically scales photos up if they don't fit the cell you've specified.</p>

<p>If you haven't tried MagCloud, it's fun and cheap to give it a try.</p>

<p>[i'm not connected with MagCloud, Blurb, or Adobe. I have a standalone Mac app that works like the Lightroom Print module (without the bug, and with the ability to add covers), but under Photo.net rules I'm not allowed to tell you its name.]</p>

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