I’ve been printing books, cards, and calendars from Apple Photos (and iPhoto earlier) on the Mac for multiple decades now. It has been a unique source of joy for me and the family. I have significantly preferred Motif over Mimeo and this merger will just continue to deteriorate the experience of a key part of my Photos experience.

I started with Apple’s own printing service (which apparently outsourced to Mimeo) and then switched primarily to Mimeo when Apple stopped their direct service and built third-party connectors in their apps.

Mimeo started out quite well but soon deteriorated significantly in their printing and paper quality. I moved on to Motif and have been a happy customer for the last 2-3 years.

I don’t welcome the news of Motif’s acquisition by Mimeo. It will make my experience printing photo-related artifacts significantly worse.

Thankfully, I do a lot of this printing at the year end, so I will have some time to find a replacement. I like to use app-based tool ideally built right into Photos, rather than web-based tools and hence services like Shutterfly are just not for me.

This whole process has been becoming worse over the years (older projects are lost over time without any ability to reprint, no ability to save your projects as PDFs, and so on). Maybe this consolidation will make it viable for a single organization to provide more durable solutions but that feels like wishful thinking. Mergers are like this are generally not designed to add more value to customers.