One of the most satisfying ways to share digital photos is to do so using an increasingly popular and delightfully analog item: the photo book. These books contain a collection of your digital photos, professionally printed on heavy paper and handsomely bound with hard or soft covers. They are fairly priced and can be made and ordered with little effort or skill.

MyPublisher Inc. (www.mypublisher.com), the company that started this business over five years ago, continues as a main player in the field. It now offers its books in various sizes and prices, and recently released a new version of its book-assembling software program, BookMaker 2.0.

Apple Computer, iPhoto Price: $29.99 for 8.5″x11″.

But other companies know well the emotional draw of these books — and so sell their own photo books that play to their strengths. Apple Computer Inc. uses iPhoto, the stellar photo-organizing program that comes on its computers, as a starting point for making books, incorporating handy editing within the company’s famously simple user interface.

Eastman Kodak Co.’s Kodak EasyShare Gallery (www.kodakgallery.com), one of the most popular Web sites for sharing digital photos, encourages users to make a book using photos that may already be uploaded for sharing. Its book-assembling software is a Web-based interactive program.

Each company offers a hardcover photo book that measures roughly the same size and costs $30 for 20 printed pages. The only way to know how each book will look is to assemble and order one from each company. So this week, we did the job for you, taking time to make and order books from MyPublisher, Apple and Kodak EasyShare Gallery.

All three contenders use book-making software that allows you to choose various themes and layouts. With each, you can either start from scratch, manually placing every photo, or you can start with an auto-fill feature that initially places your photos throughout the book, but allows you to rearrange, resize or delete them, or add others.

MyPublisher Inc. Price: $29.80 for 8.75″x11.25″; $59.80 for 11.5″x15″.

In our test, MyPublisher, which runs on Mac and Windows operating systems, reigned supreme, though Apple wasn’t far behind. MyPublisher offers three book sizes, three cover materials, two ways to display a cover photo, an intuitive assembling software program and elegant layouts. Though Apple’s iPhoto books were a pleasure to make and produced some of the most artistically appealing books with 19 optional themes, iPhoto runs only on Macs, leaving out most computer users. And it doesn’t offer as much overall variety as MyPublisher.

Kodak’s books cost the same or more than those from MyPublisher and Apple, yet stood out as the most difficult to assemble and the least attractive. And because Kodak EasyShare Gallery’s book-making software lives online, it’s slower.

We used the same set of photos from Katie’s summer vacation to make each book in standard size — about 8.5″ by 11″ for MyPub and Apple and 9″ by 10″ for Kodak — and started with each company’s auto-fill feature.

We also created the newest extra-large books offered by Kodak and MyPublisher; respectively, they measure 12″ by 14″ and 11.5″ by 15″ and cost about $70 and $60 for 20 pages. Apple doesn’t offer larger books.

MyPublisher’s BookMaker 2.0 follows five steps: Get Photos, Organize, Make Book, Preview and Purchase. These numbered sections appear at the bottom of your screen with your current step highlighted; moving ahead or back is done by selecting another section. To get your photos into MyPublisher, you can drag and drop them into BookMaker 2.0 from anywhere on your computer.

We spent most of our time in MyPublisher’s third step: Make Book. Here, we edited images, moved them around to tweak the auto-fill feature and changed page layouts. A bar at the top of the screen offers a place for dragging and dropping unused photos or those you’d rather use later. After assembling a page filled with sailboat images, we saved one unused sailboat shot for later in the book and this area served as a reminder that it was there.

Kodak EasyShare Gallery Price: $29.99 for 9″x10.25″; $69.99 for 12″x14″.

Page layouts describe your options for arranging photos on each page. For example, one three-photo layout arranges a large image above two smaller shots. MyPublisher’s small flaw is that it doesn’t automatically coordinate page layouts with the number of photos you choose to show per page; you must select the number of photos per page and then choose the page layout in a separate step.

Depending on the type of book you choose, you can opt to add captions or not; we opted for layouts that emphasized photos rather than photos and captions, but added a few captions when possible. We typed out titles on the cover of each book, and added a few sentences of description on the title page. IPhoto offered automatic spell checking; the others didn’t.

In iPhoto, we looked through 19 book themes before settling on Watercolor — a design with calming pastel colors in the background of each page and colored stripes on the cover. IPhoto provided the best editing options, including red-eye remover, retouching and eight different photo-altering effects. Its full-screen option shows extremely large images of photos for detailed editing. As we assembled the book, we easily switched to editing mode by double-clicking on a photo.

IPhoto, like MyPublisher, has a section for holding unused photos at the top of its screen. This section could also display the entire book’s pages and layouts — helping us avoid repeating the same layouts page after page.

Kodak EasyShare Gallery struck out in too many areas. Its Web-based software took a few seconds to save our book every time we turned to another page. We couldn’t see our book’s pages or the photos themselves in a detailed view.

The most frustrating feature of Kodak EasyShare Gallery is its lame selection of page layouts. Even the semi-interesting layouts arrange all photos (except full-page images) up too high on the page. And the auto-fill feature in Kodak’s largest book had such limited layout choices that we would have given up, had we not been testing for this column.

The finished products for each book matched our experiences with their software: the standard and extra-large books from MyPublisher were attractive and well made. We especially like MyPublisher’s cover choices: either a matted image viewed through an opening in the hard cover, or a label with one of our photos. The iPhoto books looked stylishly unique and used the most attractive fonts on the cover and title page. But they didn’t offer the covers with an inset photo, which we found more attractive.

The standard and extra-large books that we made using Kodak EasyShare Gallery both arrived with cheap-looking bindings. The covers on these books both used inset photos, but with windows that were too small to see the book’s title, which makes no sense. And the layouts for photos were nowhere near as appealing as those made with the other companies.

If you want the best combination of variety and a software program that works on all computers, you’ll be pleased with MyPublisher. IPhoto’s books are just as attractive and even more stylish, but aren’t available for Windows users or those hoping to make a large book. This holiday season, consider choosing one of these two book-making programs to hold your family memories.

Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications

MyPublisher doesn’t plan to release a version of its BookMaker 2.0 software to run on Apple Computer Inc.’s Macintosh computers until next month. Macintosh owners today can use MyPublisher to print their photo books, but they must use a plug-in for Apple’s iPhoto program. This article erroneously implied that the MyPublisher software for making photo books runs on Macintosh computers now.

With a physical scrapbook or photo album, you can snuggle up in bed with the book on your lap, peeling fading prints from their pages and glancing on the back for hand-written notations or dates. You can scribble memories in the book next to each photo, or tape ticket stubs and dried flowers beside pictures from the eighth-grade play.

Of course you can easily view your pictures in a slide show on a computer screen, or even on some iPod models. But for those who miss the feel of the old photo albums, there’s a software product that aims to be the digital equivalent: FlipAlbum 6 Suite, by E-Book Systems.

This $70 program offers a way to organize your photos into digital albums that look like actual books, with three-dimensional flipping pages and page-shuffling sound effects to accompany each flip. These albums can display your photos in various layouts, with annotations below each image, and you can set music to play along with your pictures. You can post your finished albums to the Web, email links to the Web site, or burn them to CD or DVD.

My assistant Katie Boehret and I tested this software and found it to be a rather simple way to create attractive albums filled with digital photos. But the options for sharing your photo album, especially by burning it to a disc, were clumsy, limited and a little too techie for normal users.

Katie used the software’s three-step FlipAlbum Wizard to start her first album, which contained photos from a summer vacation with friends. This wizard instructed her to open the folder or album containing the photos that she wanted to use, and then to choose a page layout. She chose to show single photos on each page; the only other option the wizard offers is to display one image across both pages, centerfold-style. In step three, Katie chose “Vacation-Travel” as the book’s theme from a list of 21 options — including “Baby-Boy,” “Family Moments” and “Dog” — that dictate the “cover” design and certain organizational features.

FlipAlbum 6 Suite, $69.95, by E-Book Systems organizes digital photos into virtual albums. For more information: www.flipalbum.com.

Seconds after selecting “Finish” in the wizard, Katie’s book appeared on-screen, complete with front and back covers decorated with vacation-inspired images, a table of contents, an alphabetical index and an overview section that showed thumbnail images of each page. By placing your cursor over any of the image names or thumbnails listed in the overview, contents or index, you can jump to that image, without paging through the whole book.

Katie tweaked the album, adjusting the size and position of each image by selecting it and pulling its corner handles in certain directions. Images can be cut, copied and pasted from one page to another, and she added annotations below a few photos.

If you don’t use the FlipAlbum Wizard to create your book, you can select page layouts that display multiple images per page. But just as with the wizard, each page has the same layout, which is annoying. Though layouts can be manually tweaked, these one-layout-fits-all offerings are a boring, creativity-restricting pain.

Options for adding music to your album include playing digital music files in the background throughout the entire album, on individual pages or when the viewer selects inserted music icons. Katie chose James Taylor’s song “Mexico” to play in the background as she viewed her vacation photos, by selecting the MP3 file from her hard drive while in the “Book Options” menu.

In another album, Katie organized photos from a friend’s wedding. Whenever imported image files have names — as the wedding images did — FlipAlbum converts them into captions that can then be edited. So these captions automatically appeared when Katie imported the photos into her “Wedding-Traditional” themed book. The theme’s design had special sections in the back labeled “Church,” “Outdoor” and “Reception,” and Katie easily moved certain photos to appropriate sections.

I also made a test album with FlipAlbum, using pictures I took at the awe-inspiring opening-day ceremony in Boston’s Fenway Park, where the World Champion Boston Red Sox received their World Series rings and the championship banner was raised over the old ballpark for the first time in 86 years. It was fast, easy and satisfying, and I was able to give captions to the pictures in a variety of fonts and colors.

A handy digital bookmark icon can be selected from the top of the screen to keep your place in larger albums. To return to the marked page, just select the bookmark and pages will rapidly flip to the correct spot.

When it came time to burn these FlipBooks onto CDs, we were a little discouraged. Even with its $70 price tag, FlipAlbum 6 doesn’t include special software that walks you through the process. Instead, it just helps you convert your album into four files, which you must then know how to copy onto disc. Some people who have mastered their computer’s burning software might be in luck, and it’s not too difficult to do this on Windows XP. But for users who aren’t familiar with the CD-burning process, this part could be frustrating.

Katie converted her vacation album into files by selecting the “CD Maker” icon and following a few simple steps. She copied the files onto a blank CD-R, and fed it into a different Windows XP computer that didn’t have FlipAlbum software installed on it. It opened automatically, displaying the album and automatically playing the background song, “Mexico.”

FlipAlbum says its files will run on Macs, though not automatically, so she inserted the CD into my iMac G5 running Tiger, Apple’s newest operating system. After selecting the Mac CDViewer (one of the four files she copied onto the CD) the album opened. But the music was skipping and stuttering while she flipped through the album, and images took much too long to load on each page.

Technically, the albums can also be converted into files that you can burn to a DVD, so your photo album plays like a slide show on a DVD player. But FlipAlbum doesn’t provide any software for doing this. You must have your own separate DVD-burning software, or use a manual file-converting process that is much too geeky for regular users.

Icons labeled “Upload” and “Email” in the FlipAlbum 6 Suite software seem to make it easy for users to share their albums. But only albums that are five megabytes or less can be uploaded free of charge to the company’s Web site, and many are much larger than that. Web accounts of various sizes are available for three or 12 months at a time; these range from about $10 to $190. And instead of emailing the actual album, the “Email” icon only directs users on how to email a link of their album if it’s already uploaded to the company Web site.

A cheaper, $40 Standard version of the FlipAlbum 6 is also available, but among other things, it doesn’t let you create CDs.

FlipAlbum 6 is a clever idea, and it takes only a few steps to copy your digital images into a handsome photo book format. But the whole point of creating scrapbooks and photo albums — real or digital — is to share them, and this software doesn’t make it easy for average users to share their albums. If you want to share your photos in a book, you’d be better off using a service like MyPublisher (www.mypublisher.com) to turn them into a real paper book, and send that to your friends and family.

With reporting by Katherine Boehret

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at mossberg@wsj.com