I used snapfish for my Dads birthday. It worked really well. I did think some of the photos were a little too red compared to the originals but no one else commented.
I put his family tree on the front - ancestors, and his descendants at the back. And I got all his family to sign it on the day. I got several copies made, one for each sibling so everyone had their own memento, which I got printed after the party so I could include a few pages from his birthday celebration.
My Dad loved it but it took us a good few months to find some early photos from his life and identify date and time. My dad was into sport and we had a few newspaper clippings which I added to the background on some early pages. I included my parents group wedding photo, and then a smaller version with numbers where the heads were and identified all the attendees in some text. (It was a bit depressing, most were dead!). I did try to identify everyone in each photo, and for all the grandchildren to give them equal billing, but some of my siblings produced very few photos of their kids with their grandad.
The old black and white photos scanned really well. Some of the 70’s colour ones not so good, and I got one of my kids to digitally repair some photos, which she did on her iPhone. Checking and double checking the layout and the special effect was very time consuming, but worth it.