I'm finishing up my designs for my studio sample albums today. I've decided to go with PictoBooks because I really like the look of their product...online, anyway. I've gotten good input so far from other photographers about their albums and service, so I'm going to have to trust that for my first albums, I guess! (Nervous!!)

I emailed PictoBooks about this issue but haven't heard back yet, probably because of the holiday weekend.

I know they want you to design pagespread layouts with 1/16 extra on the margins, but what about the center of the pagespread - the part that will be sewn into the spine? How much "clearance" do I give there? I know PictoBooks has a "split spine" binding feature that makes each image lie totally flat and gives a "seamless" flow to photos that take up both sides of a page spread, but unfortunately I cannot find info on how to design for that on their web site. They have a design tool, but it's offline right now due to some kind of funky errors it was having in November.

So, if anybody's used PictoBooks before, can you please enlighten me? I appreciate any help!

if you order the seamless gutter, then it's not too much of a problem. You just don't want to put anything important in the gutter, as always.

As a general rule, regradles of the album manufacturer, I leave about 1/4 inch to each side of the spine to make sure nothing important falls there. Same I do with borders, 1/4 inch all around.