Photo book - who can print my book in australia?

Question

I have created a storybook from my photos in Photoshop elements and want to get it professionally printed as a book.  Places like snapfish can do it but they require you to use their software.  Does anyone know someone who will print it from a pdf or a *.pse file that I can create?  Or is there another format in elements I could use?  Ideally they would be in Australia but perhaps even overseas
Thanks
Mamma Mia

Answer 1

If there is a company out there that does this in Australia, they have a web site.  And, that web site is indexed by Google.  So go to Google and type in some key words that would be on the web site of a company that prints books for individuals.  Key words like "book," "print," "Australia," and "thermonuclear fusion" come to mind.
I've been a professional writer for 28 years, and I've heard about this sort of thing.  It's called "vanity press".  Basically, these companies will print whatever you want, and print as many copies as you want.
You may be limiting yourself too much by requiring the company to be in Australia.  Basically, why do you care where they are located?  You are going to send them one or more high-quality pdfs by e-mail.  On their web site, you are going to type in your name, address, and credit card information.  Then they will ship you as many copies of the resulting hardbound books as you have ordered.  They could be in the U.S., Canada, or Serbo-Croatia for all you care.  The shipping charge may be more, but you will have a much wider selection of venders.
The reason why I wrote "one or more high-quality pdfs" is because you probably will have a lot of pictures in your book.  It's easy to compress a large document with many pictures into a 15 megabyte file - the largest size that you can e-mail.  But you should consider whether the pictures in that compressed document are still of sufficient quality for your needs.  So open the final compressed pdf and print several of the pictures on your own printer.  Are you satisfied with the quality of these pictures?  If you aren't, then export your original document into two (or three or four) higher-quality pdfs, and send them in multiple e-mails.
You are limited to about 15 megabytes on each e-mail.  That may sound like a lot, but it disappears quickly when you deal with high-quality pictures. 
As I said, I'm a professional writer.  For years, my nephew has been bugging me to tell him what I did in Vietnam.  I was an Infantry pointman in Vietnam.  I was the first one to walk down the jungle path.  I was wounded seven times.  Because of public hostility towards Vietnam veterans, I hid what I did.  So after I retired, I thought I'd just write up what I did for my nephew.  How long could it take - five or ten pages?  The problem with being a professional writer - is that you write.  The final document in InDesign was 200 pages long, and had 100 pictures.  The final document also was 57 megabytes in size. 
In InDesign, you can choose how compressed a pdf of the final document will be.  You can choose a little compression, which would result in a large pdf, or a lot of compression, and a small pdf.  Since I had no intention of ever printing the document, I choose the maximum compression for the pdf.  The document size went from 57 megabytes to a pdf of 11 megabytes.  That was perfect for e-mailing to my nephew - but clearly some of the picture quality had been sacrificed.  My nephew didn't care, but the picture quality probably would have been noticeable if it had been printed into a "real book".