Reordering pages – With a click and a drag of your mouse, you can now move and reorder individual pages to appear exactly where you want them to inside your book. Simply click on the “Reorder Pages” button in the lower portion of the Studio™ to pull up the page editor. Then, click and drag the page thumbnail to reorder that page within your book or calendar.

Autofill Pictures – Along side the new page reordering feature there is also a handy time-saving Autofill button that will allow you to pre-populate your book with the photos you’ve added to your project. From my own experience, this tool can be especially useful when used in combination with the page reordering function, especially if your book contains a lot of photos.

Image Hosting Integration – Do use Flickr.com or Photobucket to share your images online? Well, now you can use these collections on Lulu as well to help you publish a photo book or calendar. Lulu Studio™ is now integrated with Flickr and Photobucket allowing you to easily transfer your hosted pictures over to Lulu to create a photo book or calendar.

To add your photo collections from these sites into a Lulu Studio™ project, click the Flickr or Photobucket icons from the Image tab and follow the on-screen instructions. If you already have an account set up with one of these websites, it’s pretty easy.

A few additional enhancements have been added to the caption editor within Lulu Studio™ which allows for greater flexibility customizing the text that appears alongside your pictures. Now you can select the color of your text as well as choose from a selection of fonts to go long with the theme of your calendar or photo book.

A basic Image Editing Toolbar has been added to Lulu Studio™ to allow you to change several aspects of your images.

Once you’ve added an image to your book, clicking on that image will bring up the new toolbar allowing you to flip, rotate, adjust crop and resize your images within the page template.

Finally, enhanced College Themed Calendars and Photo books have been added to Lulu Studio™

Every College football fan should check out our new Collegiate Images Photo Books page to create a photo book or calendar with pictures and themes of your favorite college team:

With the Lulu Studio™ , you can add your personal photos alongside official images from your favorite team to create the ultimate football fan book. Each team fan book is completely themed to include scenic campus shots, impressive stadium images, legendary players of the program and great moments in team history.

If you’ve recently created a Lulu Studio™ Photo Book or Calendar and have had an opportunity to try out any of these features, please let us know what you think!

Regards,
Adam

If you’re like me, then you probably still have all the pictures from that fabulous vacation you took last year taking up memory on your digital camera, or if you were really productive, then you might have transferred them to your computer. Now they’re sitting in your “My Pictures” folder, and you’re wondering what to do with them.

Fortunately, we have an answer; publish a photo book on Lulu!

Recently, I took the pictures from my trip to Europe last spring (yes, as in 2007) and made a book using the Lulu studio. I was amazed at how easy it was. The entire process took less than two hours of my time, and most of that was choosing which pictures I wanted to use. Did I mention I had a lot of them?

With the Lulu Studio photo book tool, you can control

• The binding and trim size
• Which of the different themes you want to add to the style and look of your book (ex: modern, wedding, summer vacation, holiday, etc.)
• The various formats for each page complete with allotments for captions and text.

Once you’re done, voila…you have designed and published your very own photo book. Not to mention, freed up a little more space on your memory card.

Helpful Hint: Remember to edit your pictures, if need be, before uploading them.

In addition, we’ve also just recently introduced a new expanded eligibility plan for distribution which should allow more published content into our distribution programs than ever before. Check to see if your book is eligible and sign up today!

• Lulu users in the UK will be pleased to learn that we’ve expanded our payment options to allow payments using the Visa Electron in £ (GBP). In the coming months, we hope to offer even more payment options in both £ Pounds Sterling as well as the € Euro.

• For Photo book creators we’ve expanded on some image editing features in the Lulu Studio™ allowing users to rotate the angle of their images within a photo book. If your digital photos were taken at an angle that prevents them from displaying right side up, simply hover your mouse over the image to display a “rotate” icon which will allow you to rotate your image 90 degrees at a time.
  

Lulu Studio now allows you to rotate imageswithin your photo book.

• Flash Previews are now available for Lulu Studio™. We’re happy to announce that we are able to offer the same Flash-based previews for Lulu Studio photo books that we offer for our full line of book products.

• Lulu’s Community Homepage has had a bit of a makeover. While aside from appearance, not a whole lot has changed, we think you’ll find the new layout much more appealing and user-friendly.

Additional release notes and other fixes have also been posted here in the forums.

-Adam