Kodak Gallery recently gave me a $35 code to try out their digital scrapbooking system and potentially share it with you. If you’ve been reading here for any length of time, you know this will be an honest review and no amount of free crap would make me lie to you. (With giveaway – read on!)

Let me preface this review by saying that I’ve been scrapbooking for years before I even had children and am a completely addicted Heritage Makers addict. So much so that I became a consultant just to get the deals for myself because I do so much of it. After paper crafting for years, I tried the Creative Memories storybook software, Kodak Gallery, Snapfish and many more. There may not be one I haven’t used, and I decided on Heritage Makers about three seconds after trying it and seeing their products. This will become important later on.

The Kodak website is fairly easy to use. Log in or register, choose a template, upload your pictures, drag and drop them in to pre-made templates. You can edit the pages to the very smallest degree possible – that is, you can choose another of their pre-made templates to switch into that spot. For anyone with the teeniest amount of creativity it’s incredibly limiting. I found it very frustrating not to be able to change colours, add embellishments, move text around or really do anything other than drag and drop. However, for someone who doesn’t like to craft and wants to do a book without ever having to really think about it, I would imagine Kodak Gallery would be great. The book was $35, and I had to pay for my own shipping – normally something that would make the review a no-go (ridiculous, much?) but I wanted to see the difference between these and the Heritage Makers books that I love so much. Truly, there’s no comparison. The Kodak book has a decent binding but not great, and the “linen” cover feels pretty low quality. It’s not customizable at all, and just has a little window in to the first picture, the size of which is not editable so part of my kids are cut off from the cover view. I’m not impressed and wouldn’t pay to order from Kodak Gallery again. Perhaps if I’d never seen a Heritage Makers book I may have had a different opinion, but the quality of both the online software and the product are so much less with Kodak that I just can’t recommend them. But I can hook you up with Heritage Makers if you like – just let me know in comments.

That said, I still have a $35 gift code to give away so comment here or email me if you’d like to try it and I’ll get the kids to do a draw from all comments and emails when I get around to it and one of you can try it out too.