TechRadar Verdict
Printique’s photo book service is simple and straightforward to use, offering a great range of templates that you can plug your pics into, while offering a high level of flexibility for anyone who wants to flex their design skills. The printed photo books are of a fantastic quality, with vibrant colors and super-accurate printing. The only real caveat is the price: you’ll have to pay a premium for such high-quality results.
Pros
- +
Precise, flexible design tools
- +
Easy to use
- +
High-quality final product
Cons
- -
Fewer templates than some rivals
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Occasionally quirky platform behavior
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More expensive than some rivals
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Printique photo book: review
The Printique photo book service offers a great option for whipping up a personal gift for a loved one or presenting your photography portfolio in its best light. It offers a wide range of pre-formatted themes, while allowing you all the flexibility you need to design a truly custom photo book from scratch.
If you’re just looking for quick and easy results, Printique’s photo books offer plenty of templates to choose from. Whether you’re looking for a clean and classy wedding photo book, a striking photography portfolio, or a photo album of your pet pupperino, there are a good number of options – although at 88 themes, its options are dwarfed by the more than 500 options listed by Mixbook. Just select a template and Printique will apply it to your whole project, then all you need to do is drag and drop your chosen snaps into the provided frames.
For those who want a little more customizability, Printique also provides layouts you can drag into individual pages and spreads in your photo book. From full-bleed images that span both pages to inset grids of thumbnail-size pics, these make it easy to include more variation in layouts and really adapt your book to fit your photos, rather than the other way around.
But what if you don’t want to color within the lines? What if you want to make a completely original photo book from scratch? Well there’s good news: building my own DIY Printique photo book was a snap, easily rivaling the best photo book services.
Placing images is simple: I just dragged my photos onto the page and they’d be added as image frames. On top of this, Printique’s built-in snap functionality made it easy to align them with each other or clip them to each spread’s margins. It even allows for really granular control over the size and position of image frames: the pop-up menu’s Properties section let me manually set images to specific dimensions and XY coordinates, as well as checking the DPI of each one to ensure it would print at a decent resolution.
There was the occasional bug here though – some images stubbornly insisted on defaulting to weirdly specific decimals like 4.97 inches, and resisted all of my attempts to set them to a whole integer. Odd behavior, but ultimately not a deal breaker.
Recreating the colored blocks and ribbons from TechRadar’s photo book test template was also pretty painless. Printique offers a range of shapes that you can add to your projects, and these are all super-flexible: I could precisely control their dimensions, add borders, and apply drop shadows from the properties menu. I was also able to change their color by entering a HEX code, setting RGB values or dragging a cursor to set saturation or brightness. However, the latter exhibited some odd behavior – changing either value would cause the color I’d chosen to creep away from my chosen hue, which occasionally proved irritating when I had a specific tone in mind.
Adding captions and credits to my photo book was also easy. Once I’d dropped a text box onto the page, I quickly was able to choose the font, size, styling and alignment. A small time-saver I especially appreciated is the ability to save chosen font settings as a style, which made it easy to achieve a consistent look for text throughout my photo book.
Thanks to some extra settings, it’s possible to get really creative with your layouts. First, Printique provides a wide range of shaped frames that allow you to show off your pics in rounded, slanted or even letter-shaped frames. While some of these are potentially a bit cheesy – star-shaped frames anyone? – they do add a high degree of flexibility that allows you to create some sleek, professional-looking designs.
You can also add extra flourishes and detail to your photo book using Printique’s background and sticker tools. Backgrounds offer everything from customizable block colors to a wide array of illustrations and patterns. Meanwhile, the stickers allow you to add pre-formulated text and illustrations to your photo book, from inscriptions about love to holiday iconography. Personally, some of the stickers aren’t to my tastes, giving things a distinctly clip-art vibe, but there are still a lot of choices there that could make useful ornaments to your text.
You will have to pay a premium for such powerful tools, however. Printique’s photo books were marginally more expensive than some of the other services we've tested. A 12 x 12 inch photo book cost $145.78 including delivery (roughly £112), whereas Shutterfly cost $132.5 (roughly £102) and Mixbook cost $133 (£102.25). It’s only a tiny price increase though, and I would argue one that’s more than worth it, given the flexibility of Printique’s platform.
Printique photo book review: performance

The printed photo book we received from Printique offered very high-quality results, with extra-thick pages and consistently good color and accuracy. Hues looked excellent throughout, whether it was a bright, sunny photo or more nuanced fog with creamy bokeh.
All of the photos were arranged perfectly, exactly as we set them, with no printing errors or unexpected margins. The book excels at photos that cross the binding, with a consistent look that feels mostly unbroken, allowing for very large spreads. I especially liked the brightness of the print and paper on our magenta TechRadar signature cover pages. Branding from Printique was minimal, but still present.
The heavy feel of the Printique photo book adds a nice bit of gravity to photos with the weight of the paper. I was almost worried that I would tear the heavy paper as I turned the pages, but the book held its binding nicely, and the photos feel even more special on such a thick presentation. This would make a fine photo book for wedding photography, very special occasions, or to highlight the best shots in your portfolio.
The pages may be a bit too thick if you're printing a large volume of work, and I still worry about those thick pages tearing with constant turning over the years. But for making a selection of photos feel extra premium, Printique’s photo books are a great choice.
Should I buy the Printique photo book?
Buy it if…
You want a high degree of customizability
Whether it’s precisely controlling image dimensions, adding shaped image frames, including shapes in every color of the rainbow, or stamping your book with illustrations, you’re free to customize your photo book your way.
You want a polished final product
With quality tactile paper, vivid colors and unerringly precisely alignments, Printique's photo books are finished to an excellent standard, making them a gorgeous gift for loved ones.
Don’t buy it if…
You want big savings
There are cheaper photo book services out there. While Printique offers one of the best services we’ve tried, you can absolutely save some money elsewhere.
You want a huge array of ready-to-go templates
Printique has a decent number of templates for you to start plugging your photos into, but if you don’t care about customizability and just want the most prefabricated options, services like Mixbook offer many more.
Printique photo book review: also consider
Mixbook
With over 500 templates locked and loaded, Mixbook is a great choice if you want a no-hassle layout without needing to get into the nitty-gritty of creating your own designs. However, during our Mixbook photo book review we did find there were a few marks left by the printing process, so it’s worth bearing this in mind if you’re considering it for a gift.
Mimeo
For sheer simplicity, Mimeo can’t be beat – its stripped-back offering allows you to just get on with the design without having to wade through too many options. However, it is pricey. Creating a 10 x 10-inch layflat photobook – the closest you can get to the 12 x 12 inch one we created here – will set you back $169.51 (£133.11) and that’s not including the $13.99 (around £10.80) shipping fee. Read our full Mimeo photo book review.
How I tested the Printique photo book
- I exactly recreated TechRadar’s photo book test template
- I spent many hours using the platform and experimenting with templates
- I have over a decade’s experience working in print and design
At TechRadar, we use a set photo book template that we attempt to recreate using every photo book platform we review. I followed this as closely as possible, sizing images according to precise measurements, adding colored shapes in specific hues and shades, and recreating captions and credits in specific fonts and styles, allowing me to assess how easy it was to recreate specific designs that users might have in mind.
Our US Mobiles Editor Philip Berne then assessed the final product, analyzing its overall quality and finish, and comparing it to the template to identify any potential errors in the printing process.
Additionally, I spent several hours playing around with the platform’s templates, layouts, shaped frames and illustrations to see how effective its off-the-shelf design elements were.
I’m an experienced photographer, having spent many years shooting both on my Canon DSLR and my iPhone 16 Pro. I’ve also spent many years working in print, creating layouts for magazines and doing post-production on images, meaning I've spent a lot of time using design tools for producing printed products.
- First reviewed: May 2025
- Read more about how we test

Josh is Reviews Editor at TechRadar. With over ten years of experience covering tech both in print and online, he’s served as editor of T3 and net magazines and written about everything from groundbreaking gadgets to innovative Silicon Valley startups. He’s an expert in a wide range of products from Spatial Audio headphones to gaming handhelds. When he’s not putting trailblazing tech through its paces, he can be found making melodic techno or seeking out the perfect cold brew coffee.
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