iPhoto Photo Books
 

I've now gone through all 35,000 photos and have chosen about 800 which I want to have printed as photo books. All I want is a very simple format: 3 or 4 photos per page (depending on orientation) and the ability to add a caption to each photo.

This seems to be impossible with iPhoto. You can choose from a number of themes, all of which want to do a mix of between one and half a dozen photos per page. None of the themes which allow more than two photos per page also allow a caption for each photo. Oh, well.

Moving on:

Anyone have experience with non-Apple photo books?

I would think that if you used your editor of choice to produce a PDF you could have it printed and bound at almost any service bureau that does low volume. Won't be as cheap, but it will be what you want.

Maybe that's a solution. Graphic Converter has a really nice feature that lets you create a catalog of an entire folder with a fixed number of images per page. You can save that as a PDF.

Good idea.

Before you start building the document, I'd suggest determining who will do your printing. That will tell you the specs you need to have in place (CMYK vs. RGB, DPI, page margins, etc.), and knowing that stuff in advance will save you loads of time and inconveniences later.

Separately, I haven't used Graphics Converter in years, but I can't imagine a document-based production would go well using that. I mean, making individual files for each page sounds brutal. Think about that: 800 pictures, 3 or 4 to a page, that's like 200–270 files to make all the pages. Use Graphics Converter for image editing, but a document-focused application will make your life much easier for page layout, even if you don't use InDesign or Quark and go with something simpler like Pages.

GC is pretty fast. One click and you have a multi-page PDF document with however many images per page you want. GC rescales the photos to fit (which is what I want) and has multiple options for each photo's header/footer. You don't have to layout each page, GC does it all.

Turns out that Shutterfly has a fairly decent interface for book creation and allows you to set up the pages pretty much any way you want, including text anywhere on the page. I think this will fit the bill for me. They also have a workable iPhoto plugin for uploading photos. Since I'd already exported to iPhoto thinking I'd use Apple's photo books, this makes it easy for me. Uploading is fast.

They got a good review from ZDnet. But, it seems it's a bit pricey.

I am temporary. I accept it.

Keep everything - with computers hoarding is OK
 

I have tons of video and quite a few pics that I want to pass on to future generations. Without any context most of the meaning is lost.

My app allows me to randomly display / play groupings of "video pictures audio and text" That way I can insert some text before the video or picture explaining the circumstances.

I keep few data formats... Mpg, jpg, bmp, mp3 and txt etc. When is portable then it has a chance at longevity.

So for my digital legacy there will be a USB stick that contains the app and a "click_this_to_explain" executable that will have some video and text explaining what and how I am passing on. The rest of the cataloged data will be on the USB stick as well.