Adobe CC. This enables our family tradition to produce photo books for our important events and vacations of our life. In the past we used softwares provided by photo book companies but all of them either phased out their software or being acquired. (They might be rebranded softwares by someone else, seems to be written in Java.)
Since then after I finished doing photo retouching with Lightroom Classic, my wife would use Photoshop and InDesign to design the photo book.
Other Adobe CC apps are at times very useful such as Premiere for Video editing videos we took during a vacation.
Investing into a system like this can be very expensive, not in the $ sense but more like time invested and vendor lock in. Once you invested the time to train in this tools it is very costly to migrate away from it as you become more busy with life. But then it is also very hard to find an alternative that does everything I need from Adobe. Adobe is an ecosystem and is an easy path to start.
We have this problem as well, but realistically - how often do you need or even look at the digital originals of photo books? Yes, the work invested would be lost but we let those print once and still have the original photos. As long as the service does not shut down or change software while you are working on a photo book (hey, it only happened once due to... procrastination). it shouldn't really matter.
Since then after I finished doing photo retouching with Lightroom Classic, my wife would use Photoshop and InDesign to design the photo book.
Other Adobe CC apps are at times very useful such as Premiere for Video editing videos we took during a vacation.
Investing into a system like this can be very expensive, not in the $ sense but more like time invested and vendor lock in. Once you invested the time to train in this tools it is very costly to migrate away from it as you become more busy with life. But then it is also very hard to find an alternative that does everything I need from Adobe. Adobe is an ecosystem and is an easy path to start.