Adobe and photos go hand in hand. We make the leading editing application, and Lightroom is a must have for any serious digital photographer. With Flex, developers have created some great web based photo editing tools, like Picnik and Adobe Photoshop Express. So it should come as no surprise that Albelli has created an AIR based photo book application, much like you can do with iPhoto on the Mac.

I'm a big fan of iPhoto books - I've ordered a few of them over the years for big trips and big events. Albelli's solution isn't as polished as Apple's, but its a good start. It has integration with all the major photo sharing sites, like Photobucket, Flickr, Picasa, and SmugMug, or you can drag and drop photos from your desktop into the application.

Once the photos have been selected, you can drag and drop them onto pages of your book, customizing the book with a theme, number of photos on the page and the number of pages in the book. The ordering process is done inside the application, and the costs are reasonable.

I don't know about the quality of the books, as I haven't ordered any, but I think applications like this have a lot of potential - users are willing to pay for physical products, and I love the integration with existing photo sharing sites.

Mixbook is a Flex based application that allows you to create printed photo books, much as you can with iPhoto, with a few interesting twists. As Ryan Stewart mentions in his blog, this is an interesting twist on Web 2.0 - no ads, no subscription costs; Mixbook makes money by sending you a physical good.

Unlike iPhoto, Mixbook allows you to work collaboratively with other people in making the book, so the onus for creation isn't on one person. You can easily invite other people to your book, and then collaborate with them to create the finished product.

The finished product is available in two forms, the printed book that is shipped to you as well as an online photo book, complete with page turn animations (Sample). Users can rate and comment on the finished online book.

This application would be great as an AIR application. Adobe AIR would add the ability to drag and drop photos directly from the desktop into the application, without having to upload the photos to Mixbook's servers.