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In 2017, we travelled to the Greek island Kefalonia. It was our first longer distance photography travel and when we came home, we immediatly sat down to edit the photos and create a beautiful photobook from Saal Digital. We were pretty impressed with the photobook and wrote a blogpost about the experience of designing the book and how it turned out here.

We’ve had many beautiful travels since and had the opportunity to take photos that still amaze us and held fond memories when we look back at them.

Did you print all of them and find joy in looking at them every day?

Obviously not. They’re safely tugged away on our NAS and surprise us whenever we are looking for something else and then accidentally stumble over photos of stunning sunrises, wild animals, impressive waterfalls and eye catching street scenarios.

Luckily, Saal Digital offered a discount code for photographers who are up for testing their Professional Line photobooks, so we grabbed the chance by the horns and actually ordered photobooks from travels to two landscape heavy travels: Scotland in 2018 and Norway in 2022.

The photobook from 2017 with photos from Kefalonia was the 42x28 Photo Book.

The photobook with photos from Norway is the 28 x 19 Photo Book XT.

The photobook with photos from Scotland is the 40 x 30 Professional Line Photo Book.

As we now own three differerent types of their books, we will also write about the books that are not the Professional Line photobook as they provide a good reference for comparison.

Saal Digital

Saal Digital is from Germany and delivers to more than 25 countries. They offer a big variety of photography related products which both appeals to hobby photographers, but especially also professional photographers with a lot of options to optimize the quality of your print.

Layflat Binding

All of Saal Digital’s photobooks have layflat binding which means that the pages lie flat when the book is opened and there is barely any seam visible. This makes paging through the book a pleasant experience and invites to use full cover photos that cover both pages.

Designing the Photobook

As a first user, getting an overview over all tools and functions and learning how to use them, could be a little overwhelming. Not because they are difficult to use, but because there are a lot of elements screaming for your attention and because some of them are hidden a little better than others. It would be nice to see that a design software for photobooks moved away from the usual UI towards something more modern.

This is a quote from our review in 2017.

Unfortunately, in 2025, the UI is still very much the same and has not turned towards something more modern. It didn’t bother me that much back then, but definetely did so this time. Saal Digital has a lot of different products, and each product has a lot of customization options and it can be very overwhelming and confusing. All these options are forced down into the software in a not very transparent way together with a lot of design and formatting options. Some of the settings and functionalities are hidden behind unclear terminology and the UX and colour scheme can lead to unintended actions.

While it kinda was working and ordering the photobooks was no problem, I would not describe the software as being up to date or easy to use. It still is not available for Linux (does not seem planned either).

The Professional Line Photo Book

The Professional Line Photo Book comes with a fancy cover of luxusurious materials. The front part can be an acrylic print (as was our choice) or a brushed metal print. You can also chose not to use a photo as cover and instead use a full cover of materials like leatherette (artifical leather), cork or linen.

The size of our book and the thickness of the acrylic cover give it a hefty weight. Personally, I wouldn’t use fewer pages (our has 36 pages) as I feel like the thickness of the acrylic print would overpower the amount of pages. If that makes sense.

The leather gives the book a high quality and elegant feel and makes it stand out in comparison to other regular photo books.

Both the monochrome and color photos pop nicely.

The Photo Book XT

I was surprised when I saw the thickness of this book.

Did I order that many pages? Wow.

Then I started paging through the book and noticed: the pages are thick. This illustrates how many products and customization options Saal Digital offers: when trying to find the description of the thick pages, I had to search and scroll for a while before finding this explanation in the bottom:

The pages of the XT Photo Book are reinforced with an impressive 600 g/m² cardboard substrate, giving them a unique, substantial feel.

While I did not expect the thickness of the photo book (would be great if the Saal Digital software offered a 3D preview of the book to give an indication of the size and thickness), I learned to appreciate the thick pages. Somehow, they give each page more weight - you see what I did there?

Conclusion

Overall and apart from the comments on usability of the software and clarity of the product catalogue, we are fans of Saal Digital’s products and recommend to everyone to print their photos. Don’t just wait until you search your NAS for the screenshot you took of something for keepsaking and then end up admiring all your beautiful photos. Put them out there for your eyes and brain to cherish and remember why you love photography.

If you still can’t really picture the size of them all or want to see the thick pages in action, check out our YouTube video in which we flick through the pages!