The interface for designing a book is simple, but you can organize your photos in some creative ways. I set up most of my pages with the photos floating in the middle, leaving a thick white border around them. For some, I chose a full-bleed option, which makes the photo run all the way to the edges of the page. (In those cases, I got to select how the photo would be cropped, which was nice.) I shuffled the order of the photos with Google's drag-and-drop interface and found that juxtaposing the two layout styles (matte and full bleed) on facing pages made the results look almost professional. The resulting book arrived within a week. It feels nice, with thick, satin-finish covers, a square-bound spine, and very minimal Google branding on the back cover.

Google Photos does compress images when you upload them to the cloud, keeping them under 16 megapixels. But on my small, 7-inch softcover book, I can't see any pixelation or digital artifacts in the pictures. About half my shots were from my Pixel phone with a 12-megapixel sensor, the other half from a nice Ricoh point-and-shoot with a 24-megapixel sensor. The photos in my book look nice and sharp, and I can't tell they are compressed. —Michael Calore

Starting at $15 for a photo book

Courtesy of SmugMug

SmugMug

Shop at SmugMug

If you're looking for something that goes beyond making prints of your snapshots, SmugMug is our top pick. It's popular with professional photographers for its online showcases, RAW file storage, and print sales options. You upload your images, put them in a gallery, and can showcase that to clients, and even sell prints directly from those galleries. 

SmugMug handles all the details of getting your online images to a print lab. It automatically sends your image to a printer whenever a customer orders a print, which is pretty handy if you're selling your work. Prints in the US are handled through EZPrint labs; in Europe, it works with Loxley. SmugMug is not free though. Access to the basic plan, which gets you unlimited online storage, private galleries, and tight integration with Adobe Lightroom, among other things, will set you back $13 per month.

Starting at $13 per month

Photograph: Moo

Moo

Shop at Moo

I covered SXSW for WIRED way back in 2006 and one of the strange things I remember is that everyone I met was handing out these clever little half-size business cards that came from a company named Moo. Moo still offers those cards ($21 for 100 of them), but it has also grown into a full-service print shop that can do anything from business cards to custom postcards to water bottles. Moo would not be my top pick for photographs, as that's not really its specialty, but for artwork, invitations, postcards, flyers, and just about everything else, I've been impressed. 

I printed some postcards with some custom designs (including photographs and some of my kid's artwork) and was impressed with the accuracy of the colors. All the paper I've tried has been high quality and the color matching is probably the best of all the services I've tried. You can upload your own designs for most things or use Moo's templates, which offer some customization options. That would be my only real criticism—Moo's online tools don't offer quite as many customization options as I'd like. Fortunately, it's easy to do your own work in free software like GIMP and then upload your files as PDFs or JPGs.