Costco Photo Center

Costco Photo Center

Costco Photo Center is a plug-in allows you to export your photos to Costco Photo Center. Features include export operations in Lightroom 2, 3, and 4, publish operations in Lightroom 3 and 4, album thumbnails, album sorting, and filtering in the export dialog, editable album descriptions, and flexible rules for handling duplicate uploads.

Costco Photo Center is the online print service of the members-only big box store, but you don’t have to be a member to order photo products online. Among the best photo book services we tested, the prices for Costco’s book, calendar and photo card are the lowest — especially true with the book, since it has 30 pages versus the 20-page books from other companies.

But you get what you pay for. In our tests, we found little that impressed us. If budget is your primary concern (as it often is for all of us), and all you care about is having a book of your photos in which the photos will be attractive, even if the book isn’t, check out Costco. But read the rest of our Costco Photo Center review to see how it compares to our favorite services, Printique and Mixbook.

Costco’s calendar interface is severely limited, offering little customization or creativity. There’s no clip art or drop shadows, and the selection of fonts, text colors and backgrounds is miniscule. The photo tools are only slightly better than those for the photo book, because the calendar interface has auto-correct and red-eye in addition to the two filters.

The one thing we liked about the calendar software was how easy it was to create a graphic date box event. You simply double click a date to open a sizable window where you can drag and drop a photo, move (but not zoom) the picture within the box to center on your subject, and add text in any of a handful of colors or fonts.

Costco’s book-creation software is at best merely okay, but its calendar and card interfaces are severely restrictive. The book interface is generally flexible, providing opportunities for personal creativity. The templates and layouts are fully editable. Costco’s small library of clip art includes some of the most attractive we’ve seen. On the other hand, though some of the backgrounds are pleasant, Costco doesn’t have the variety or quality of Printique or Mixbook. And while the fancy frames are attractive, the straight photo borders are limited to a small number of colors, only a few of which have more than one set width.

Costco’s book interface has no drop shadows other than those associated with some fancy frames. In addition, photo editing tools consist of only two filters (sepia and black & white), and you can’t span a photo across two pages. But the most frustrating part was that I couldn’t change the background or title font of my book’s spine to match the cover I designed, which resulted in an ugly overall appearance.

Features