Back in the fall of 2013, one company made album design a much more enjoyable task when they released SmartAlbums. Thousands of photographers are raving about how the program makes their design process much easier, and now those applauds are only going to get even louder. Yesterday, Pixellu, the company that developed SmartAlbums released version 2 and I am in love!

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Favorite Feature of SmartAlbums 2

The new SmartAlbums comes with some great new upgrades, but my favorite is the ability to make custom tweaks to any of the built-in great pre-designed templates. For example, before when I’d send album proofs to clients often I’d hear, “Can we expand the size of the images, so they take up more space on the page?” Before I had to either find a better template that fit the client request or bring the design into a program such as Photoshop or InDesign to build a new layout to accommodate the request. It wasn’t difficult, but it would take up time. Now I can make all these changes directly inside SmartAlbums with just a couple clicks. It is so ridiculously simple!

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Just to share what I mean, I recorded this quick video while building an album for my clients. I don’t show all the great updates that come along with the new version of SmartAlbums. Instead, I just took about 3-minutes to share how the new “Designer View” works and how it will truly save me so much time in album design. It is a true game changer for me.

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If you are already a user of SmartAlbums, the upgrade to version 2 is just $79 till May 19th. After that, it’s $99 for the upgrade. I’d say well worth the cost. If you are new to the program, it will cost you $299. Even at that price I believe the program is worth every penny. It will either save you a bunch of time from your current process or a ton of money by having to outsource your album design.

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Additional Features of SmartAlbums 2

Here are some additional features in SmartAlbums 2 that they discuss directly on their website.

Cloud Proofing

The all-new Cloud Proofing doesn’t just work seamlessly with SmartAlbums 2; it makes the entire album design process effortless and fun. Easily share a beautiful presentation of the album draft with your clients and review their comments and feedback without ever leaving the application. SmartAlbums 2 gets you from design to done in no time. And the best part? Cloud Proofing is currently free for 12 months ($199 value).

Matted Album Support

Matted albums are gorgeous and luxurious, but have always been extremely difficult and tedious to design. So much so, most photographers gave up on making matted albums altogether. With SmartAlbums 2, designing a matted album is easy – simply drag and drop your images on a spread and cycle through the available mats. The export for matted albums is a zipped file that contains all the files that a particular lab requires to print the album. All you need to do is upload the zip file to your print lab when placing your order.

Template Popularity

Choose to show your top templates more often by “favoriting” them, and hide others by opting to “reject.” SmartAlbums 2 also prioritizes your custom designs and over time learns which templates you like best. The result? You see more of the templates you love and less of the ones you don’t.

Backgrounds & Text

For those that want to add backgrounds or text within your album pages, you can now do that directly in the program.

You can watch this video to see all the upgrades in action:

For more information and to pick up your copy of SmartAlbums and make album design so much easier, go check out their website at: https://pixellu.com