Saal Digital Photo Book Review

Towards the end of last year, I made the decision that I wanted to create a photo book with all my favourite images I had taken throughout 2024.

While taking all these images is an amazing experience, having them sitting on hard drives or forgotten about on social media isn’t the best use of them, and actually having one of your printed images in your hands gives you such a proud feeling and sense of achievement (for me at least).

Knowing that I wanted to create my photo book and what it would mean to me, I wanted one that I knew was going to be top quality, and having followed a few YouTubers, Saal Digital was in my mind as to who I wanted to use for this.

Now for full disclosure, I did get a money off voucher to put towards my photo book as part of a promotion that Saal Digital was offering, but all my views in this post are my own, and I am not getting paid to write this.

The book that I chose for my ‘Best of 2024’ photos was from the Professional Line, and I also chose the XT edition. The pages in this option are bound onto a card substrate, making them approximately 1.1mm thick. I also went all out and got the acrylic cover, as I have always been interested as to what an acrylic print would look like (it’s bloody fantastic is what it looks like!), there is also the option for a metal cover (maybe I’ll use that for the 2025 edition of my book), as well as a plain cover option. I also chose the matte paper option as that is my favourite for printing, though there are gloss and silk papers as well.  

Now I knew what I wanted, it was onto the hard task of actually going through all my images and choosing what ones I actually wanted in the book. I chose not to keep it as just my wildlife images, but to choose my favourites taken on my Sony A7iv. So that included lots of Skylar, as well as landscapes and images I captured on our boat trips in Scotland. My aim was for the book to be a showcase of all the amazing things that I got to see, experience and photograph as a way to take me back in time and unlock those memories in my mind (smooshy I know). Having chosen and re-edited all my images (see this post for why I re-edited them) it was down to the layout.

I downloaded and used the design software straight from the Saal Digital website, though there is also an online designer as well as a mobile app for you to choose from.

The software was very easy to navigate, and I chose to use the ‘comfort designer’ option to help me with the layouts and then the ‘basic’ option, as I didn’t want any designs or illustrations on the inside, just my images.  

You can easily choose the layout options within the designer, and you can also make and save your own layouts for use on other pages. I really liked the options here as you can select the amount of images you want on a page, and the designer will show you the options just for that. Which I know sounds basic, but when you are trying to fit around 100 images into a maximum of 46 pages (this is on the XT photo book, the non XT versions can have up to 150 pages), this feature came in handy.

I managed to design the whole book and get it ordered in one evening, which I was pretty proud about. Once ordered I was given my estimated delivery time of 7 days, however it was actually with me in 5 which was brilliant.

Opening the book for the first time was quite the experience, Tim and I sat together and went through it page by page. It was quite special being able to share this moment, as he has been so supportive of me throughout my photography and for a lot of the memories, he was there with me, so they are just as much his memories and experiences as mine.

The quality of the prints in the book is incredible, the colours really pop, and the pages are nice and sturdy and very tactile (as I mentioned I got the XT option with the card pages). One of my favourite features of this book is the lay flat binding (which, from what I can see, is a feature on all the photo books offered by Saal Digital), this allows you to add panoramic images to the book and not have an obvious fold line or gutter like in other books.

I chose not to add the optional gift box, which I think in hindsight was a mistake as it would protect the book from getting bumped around, and I would feel happier, knowing that the book was safe but still handy to get out and display, as I am currently being overly precious of it!

I am over the moon with my Best of 2024 photo book and will definitely be using Saal Digital for the 2025 edition.