Motif Reviews

I wanted to make a photo book of my daughter as a gift to her grandmother in Australia. The this app website has a list of “Unsupported Shipping Destinations” which did not include Australia, so I went ahead and spent a couple of hours creating a photo book, which was not very easy as Motif has a lot of rough edges. When I was finally ready to check out, Australia was not on the list of countries for shipping destination. It is beyond me why that would be the case, it is not difficult to ship things to Australia. I emailed support and they confirmed that their website was wrong and they do not ship to Australia, though they were confused and tried to get me to upgrade my iPad to Mojave (???) and change the region to Australia first, which did not help.

Won’t be using Motif again. Try Mimeo.

I have been using this app ever since apple stopped being the printing agent for its photos (Aparature) projects. I moved over to this app since it was said that they were the actual print shop for Apple anyways. So it has been a long journey for me with how experience with this app has changed over time. The moment Mimeo bought the company a few years ago I noticed that the paper quality ant print slightly degraded. On top of that the Photos plugin for Mac freezes every few minutes. The task of completing a photo book became so unbearable that I tried something else. Wasn’t sure if it was my computer or Motif itself I switched from my favorite intel iMac to m3pro MacBook Pro and had the same experience so it is the plugin. Installed their Mimo app and it worked flawlessly on my iMac. Ordered through the mimo app and my album wasn’t perfectly made like this app ideas to do. The paper was cut at a slight angle and it shows on the inside of the back cover. Regrettably Mimeo didn’t hold up to the promise that this app used to.

Had some issues getting photos in my albums and on my iPad loaded. For some reason this app wouldn’t show me a photo that was there in the same album as ones I was able to add.

I uploaded 400 or more photos at first then added 500 more. Every time you decide you want to change the layout of the page you have to scroll through to find the photos you were working with. That gets tedious when you only have a single row to select from, about 8 photos per scroll.

You can’t shrink your photos to shrink into the allotted space on the page. So you have to choose a different layout, which in turn means you’re dealing with the problem in the above paragraph.

There’s no spell check when you add a text box.

Finally after I finished the project and was ready to pay I was told there wasn’t enough space on my iPad. No warnings about size. Of course there’s no hand off function, so my Mac couldn’t be used to complete the process. Instead I offloaded and deleted a bunch of apps that I use every day to free up memory.

Close to being a good app, but too many things that need improving for it to be one I’d recommend.

I used this app before mimeo bought it and loved it. However, this year, I just spent hours building a photobook for my husband’s 60th birthday and the purchase process has failed five times…gets stuck uploading. I’m on solid internet and have been in chat with support three times since I started this project. If you create a book in the mobile app, you can’t open it on your MacBook in iPhoto. Motif and the MacBook are separate and don’t talk to each other. Apparently my photobook on my phone is too big to upload and it has failed five times the mimeo help just says “we value your feedback”. It appears that they have a few kinks to work out. I will not use this app again and recommend that others use caution.

Update - changed from 1 to 3 stars.
I was able to process the order from my iPad, it arrived earlier than expected and is beautiful.

However the mobile app and the OS app are not compatible, you can’t go back and forth between mobile device and laptop.

I was nearly done with my 30 some page photo book, and hit the cancel button, thinking it would cancel the page I was working on. No…. It canceled everything I had done since I sat down that evening. Also no apparent way to save your work.
When using a couple fonts, they should populate into a recurring area, so you do not need to scroll through all the fonts, when correcting the font on every page!! Easy fixes that could be done.
Beautiful books!! I just wish your program was better!!

Since apple’s elimination of the in-app photo book creation feature, Mimeo has been a good alternative. However, after having made several projects throughout the years, Mimeo discontinued my account without notifying me, making it almost impossible to purchase projects that I created 😢. (Note: can’t buy your projects without an account: no buy as guest option). In addition, I encountered issues accessing photos saved to my iPhone (using 14 Pro Max), but found work arounds to resolve this. Also discovered that Mimeo:Print Your memories & Mimeo Photo are the same exact app…. Outside of that, it’s simple to use and somewhat convenient 👍

The value is good, but it was not user friendly. I had to always go back to the beginning of the camera roll every time I added any picture! Frustrating.
It should also just be a click & drag to place pictures with the date. There were WAY too many key strokes to place a pic with the date.
I am happy w/ the value, just wish it was more user friendly (and less time consuming).

this app did a reasonably good job of arranging my pictures according to rough approximation of dates of photos. I had to do some fine tuning but this is to be expected. Rearranging the pages was somewhat of a pain however. If an overview of say 20 pages was provided this would have been easier. In some of the photos I wanted to add text and this app gave quite a few options, however little did I know the text was encroaching on the photos even though visually it did not appear so. Nonetheless having a warning notice and an easier way to access the font size would have made using this app a lot more enjoyable. All in all, I give it a B to a B+ depending on how the hard copy comes out.

Motif creates lovely photo books with lots of options to choose from. You can either have all your pictures automatically placed, or like me, personally select page layouts from many options. It is easy to select a layout for the number of pictures you want to show on a page. The only thing that would make Motif better in my opinion is to give the creator the option of sizing the individual picture frame and placing text boxes where desired. But I am very happy with Motif and have made numerous photo books for gifts and for myself to enjoy. The quality is top notch!

Once I got use to the editing function, my experience got better. I sent a couple emails to support and received quick responses each time. The only concern I have with this product is after you have submitted your book you do not get to double what the vendor has uploaded so you do not know of any problems until the person you are sending the book to tell you. I am not sure I like that aspect of the vendor process. I should be able to review their uploaded file one last time to check the upload before the book goes to print.

I was used the building books on Apple, and there is not a good tutorial to show you how to get the same features on Motif. However, once I played with it a lot, I was able to build a decent book. Motif loads all your photos into page formats, and I had to undo most of that to do what I wanted. Kind of a pain. And moving things around (photos, pages) is not easy.

I have been a loyal customer of this app for many years, creating multiple calendars for my holiday gifts plus I have done great great coffee table books for each of my kids (plus a copy for the parents!). Anytime I have had any issue, customer service is fast and efficient to respond and resolve. I would never look elsewhere for my calendar or coffee table printing needs. Well done this app Team.

I used to use this company when they were Apple branded. When Apple decided to no longer offer print products I found this company through a review. I didn’t realize this was the same company Apple used. I have since ordered several books from them and they are exactly the same high level of quality when they were with Apple. Thanks this app! I hope to use your services for many years to come!

I have made many photo books over the years and had used Apple Books until they stopped supporting that platform. Most of the Apps I looked at to use as a replacement limited the number of pages to under 50 and I didn’t like the way they made most of the decisions about placement of photos for you. I also am pretty fussy about how the photos look in the book. I don’t want to send in a clear crisp photo and then have a fuzzy one in the book! I tried making a book using Motif on my computer and was very pleased with the results so when Motif came out for my phone and iPad, I jumped! At first it took a bit to discover how to do all the things I wanted to with Motif , like swapping photos that were placed automatically with ones I preferred in certain spots but it all came together and I am pleased with the results. I could even place photos and write commentary as the vacations unfold if I wanted to because Motif is so portable! I really love it. Thanks for Motif and I can’t wait to use it for making a calendar!

I have been using this app on my MacBook for a few years now to make calendars and greeting cards and love it!
I may even like Motif on my iPad even better! So easy to use and Motif like the program for the desktop warns you if your photos are low-res so you won’t get a finished job back that looks bad.
After my great-granddaughter was born I decided to do a photo book of her first year for family members. I used this app on my MacBook and it turned out beautifully. What wonderful memory for everyone to have!
You guys are awesome, thank you so much!

I got Motif because I wanted something that worked seemlessly with my iPhone photo library. That it does. But the rest of the interface was clunky and very frustrating. The worst of the offenses was when I tried to create my own book layout, there was absolutely no option to delete unused pages. I searched for answers online on how to delete pages, and it turns out my there are “x”s that are supposed to appear in the upper corner of the page, which you click on to delete the page. There were absolutely no “x”s on my app. So after troubleshooting my self-made photo album for 2 hours, I finally gave in, started over, and had Motif auto-create the album and then I reordered everything the best I could. It was an acceptable work around I *guess*, but I don’t have exactly the book I want. Oh well.

I was determined to put my many travel photos into travel books. Tried two very popular formats and quickly got stuck. Someone mentioned Apple s photo book, and knowing how helpful Apple always is with their products, I decided to give it a try. I found it to be very user friendly. Any questions I had could be quickly solved by going back and reviewing the introductory video. I completed and sent off a book with photos of recent travel and when it arrived I was thrilled! So very pleased! Have now sent off my second book.

I’ve been making family photo albums for decades since I bought my Mac and signed up for $99 per year unlimited workshops at the Apple Store. Since Apple exited from actually making albums I used Shutterfly, Google, and some other third parties. I was disappointed for one reason or another. I stopped making albums. this app has brought me back into the fold. My recent experience has been exceptional. It is user-friendly, supportive, with timely shipping at low cost.
A suggestion for further improvement is that ‘unplaced photos’ be the default with a pop up warning, as I inadvertently duplicated a few photos.

I was very disappointed that Apple discontinued their photo books in iPhoto. I had made many books to document our vacations. Then I discovered Motif for the phone. I upgraded to the iPhone 11, which takes amazing pictures. Then I used Motif to create a book of my most recent vacation, doing the entire project on my phone. The results were terrific. The printed book looks and feels as good as the old Apple Books. It was very easy to create the book on Motif . I was very happy with the outcome. As a side note, I was thinking of upgrading my DSLR camera this holiday. Now, I cannot justify that purchase, when it is so easy to take great pictures and make a beautiful book, all from my phone

Saddened when Apple stopped doing photo books. Extremely excited and happy now that this app is in the business. Two projects completed so far (ITALY Vacation and National Parks)—both are over-the-top... wonderful. From customer service to product quality, this app helped me capture those special moments; mountaintops, wildlife treasures, dear friends, Italian treasures...that will last a lifetime. Already working on my next project👍