Treering Reviews 110

We’ve had a great experience working with treering! As a homeschool group organizing a yearbook on a tight timeline and budget, we appreciated how easy the platform was to use and how responsive the support team was whenever we had questions.

From uploading photos to designing layouts and finalizing pages, the process was user-friendly—even for our first-time student editors. The printed books turned out beautifully and arrived on time, just as promised.

Thank you, treering, for helping us preserve our memories in such a meaningful way. We look forward to working with you again next year!

— Raising Arrows Homeschoolers

The Treering staff are always willing to help with questions and issues as well as providing suggestions. They also published, printed and shipped our books in record time. Overall a very good experience.

treering is absolutely horrible. it’s so confusing and not easy to make a yearbook. the website is so hard to use and it never works. there are so many things i could say but my main one is never use this for yearbooks.

The platform is incredibly user friendly! I was amazed by how quickly the orders printed and shipped after I submitted the final product. I just wish I'd had at least 12-24hrs to hit the "stop everything" button after the final review. I caught a mistake but it was already too late even though it had barely been 8hrs since I'd submitted it.

Yearbook is one of those things that you need to hurry up and wait but still have a deadline. It stresses me out. This is our first year using Treering and I am telling you now, we will use it every year moving forward. There are things that are so easy to figure out and just create. The students took to it like fish to water. There were some things that were not as clear cut BUT the customer support team was OUTSTANDING! I was treated with such respect (despite me slowness) and talked through every need and question. This was a very welcome change in the world of yearbooks. Ordering was so great too! I didn't have to worry about money. I didn't have to worry about organizing because everything came with labels and in grade levels. Love! Love! Loved that!!!!! Probably the best part besides the support team, was I might have pushed the work to the last minute and delivery was questionable to get here in time. The over delivered the great product and a week ahead of time! What company does that???? What????
One of my best experiences in product and service ever! Thank you Treering for making this ol' gal feel very successful.

The Treering staff was always very helpful when I had questions. We liked that we could only order what we needed and didn't have to order more.
We liked the link to send to parents so they could order themselves and have them shipped direct to them.

The yearbooks were beautiful and high quality. It was wonderful to get the yearbooks with the students names on them ready for delivery.

The book was less put together in previous years. Staples popping through and ripping paper, and spines breaking. This is super disappointing for students. Otherwise, an easy and fast process!

Initially I gave a pretty poor review because I didn't understand that it took 4-5 days to print yearbooks and had asked for overnight shipping. It did take a while for the copmpany to get back to me, but when they did they immediately changed the shipping method since overnight made no sense. We have received the yearbook and love it. My only advice is to make it more obvious when you choose overnight that something l;ike a book has to be printed.

The interface is still very bare minimum. There should be the ability to make word art or change up the shape/manipulate the text. The background and outline for text boxes makes a weird transparent line in the middle when both are selected. The system kept freezing up. I had to exit the page to the spread, and then back to the page to edit. There should be an option to freeze the pictures or items in place so that the layout isn't compromised by students that are editing the spread. Also, it'll be great if there was an option to drag the photo out of the current picture box to another picture box.

This platform is easy to use, affordable, and produces beautifully printed books. The only issue we had was when multiple students were using the site simultaneously, the website would be lagging, but that may be an internet connection issue.

Worst interface I've ever used. This is the 3rd time I've used Treering for my daughter's yearbook. Its absolutely sucks. Parents are spending money on these yearbooks. You'd figure they'd work out the kinks and loading issues.

Great colors and binding. Arrived in time to give to our seniors before graduation with all major school events included in our yearbook.

Fast and Quality Printing

Treering has such quick printing turnaround that we are able to submit the book much later in the year than with other companies. This allows us to cover more of the school year in the book and include more spring events.

We like the fact that we can upload pages using Background and therefore avoid using the Treering platform for design work. We like to make our pages in InDesign and then let our Middle School students add photos and certain aspects in Treering.

Technically, this is a 4.5 star review as the Treering design tools can be clunky and we don't care for the assets and pre-designed options. But we're not taking off a star since they offer a way around that. At the same time, if this were fixed, we'd give a full five-star experience vote. Resizing photos and cropping on the page are two of the main issues.

All that said, the quality of the book is consistently high. The printing quality is vibrant and colors are true. This is our fifth book with Treering and we are very happy.

I went to order my son's yearbook in my treering account that I have used for several years, and this year wasn't available. I was informed that they have deemed my account "not updated". What should have taken me 10 minutes has now been a week long ordeal with support.
Still not fixed.

Not the experience I was hoping for this time.

I recently ordered my son’s yearbook and selected his current teacher from the list provided—only to later find out I had apparently chosen the wrong school year and school. The confusing part? His teacher was listed as an option, even though she teaches at the elementary school, not the primary school he attended last year. So I’m unsure how that even happened.

Thankfully, one of the yearbook moms caught the mistake and told me to call in to get it transferred to the correct school. When I did, I was told not only could they not transfer it, but they also refused to refund me.

As a single mom, that really doesn’t sit right with me. Sure, maybe it was my mistake—but if the system allowed me to choose a teacher from a different school, something about that process is broken.

I just expected a little more understanding and flexibility. Disappointing, to say the least.

Great experience. Everything went smoothly!!

Great customer service. This was my first year doing the yearbook for our school and I decided to make the switch to Treering. We got double the pages for the same price compared to Shutterfly, and the interface was navigable for a first timer. I designed the book in InDesign and dropped hires jpegs into the yearbook layout. Worked out perfectly.

As a quick aside—I teach a Yearbook Team, and our school has used several different yearbook production companies over the years, including Herff Jones, Walsworth, and most recently, Treering. While Treering initially presents itself as clean and simplistic, it unfortunately lacks some extremely basic functionality and exposes multiple glaring bugs and oversights during real-world use.

Here are just a few recurring frustrations my team and I encountered throughout the editing process:

- Zoom Issues: When opening a page in the editor, standard text sizes (11–12pt) appear incredibly small. Anything below 16pt becomes nearly unreadable unless zoomed in. Unfortunately, zooming requires manually adjusting a percentage dropdown—there’s no smooth scroll-to-zoom or shortcut functionality, which severely disrupts workflow and makes editing tedious.

- Extended Load Times: Even minor edits—like typing a single line of text—can result in noticeable lag. This delay adds up quickly when working across many pages or making multiple adjustments.

- Erratic Text Frame Resizing: Adjusting the left handle of a text box often causes the entire frame to behave unpredictably, stretching or shrinking from the opposite side. This makes layout alignment unnecessarily frustrating.

- Uneditable Off-Page Items: Elements (like text or graphics) that are accidentally moved beyond the bleed area become unclickable and unmovable. Unlike other platforms, Treering does not allow users to grab or recover off-page assets.

- "Ghost Locked" Pages: Pages sometimes remain locked even after a team member exits, occasionally for several minutes. This seems to be a server responsiveness issue, but it creates bottlenecks and confusion in collaborative environments.

- Thumbnails Stuck on “Updating Preview”: In spread view, some thumbnails show an “Updating Preview” spinner despite not being recently edited. This occasionally affects multiple spreads, leaving them inaccessible for no clear reason.

- Clunky Photo Organization: Moving photos between folders lacks drag-and-drop functionality, making what should be a simple task feel outdated and overly complicated.

- Confusing Portrait Flow Editing System: While portrait numbers can be adjusted, users have virtually no control over the layout structure beyond selecting a preset number of portraits to flow onto a page. Intuitively, one might expect that entering "portrait mode" in the page editor would allow for the creation and management of new folders. However, this process is unnecessarily confusing and unintuitive. Folder names for portrait flows are automatically dictated by the name of the page they’re placed on and cannot be edited manually—a limitation that was only clarified after a support call with a Treering representative, as it is not documented in any FAQ or official resource. Additionally, users cannot define the number of rows or columns, nor control the spacing between portraits and name labels. This often results in awkward gaps or misalignments between names and images.

- Missing Page Status Tracking: Walsworth offered a simple but powerful system to tag each spread with statuses like “Not Started,” “Started,” “Proof,” “Submitted,” and “Completed.” When I contacted Treering support to ask if anything similar existed, the only solution offered was to “lock” the page—unfortunately, this also blocks any further editing unless manually unlocked, which defeats the purpose for workflow tracking.

- No Shortcut Support for Text Formatting: Common text-editing shortcuts such as Ctrl+B (bold), Ctrl+I (italic), and Ctrl+U (underline) do not work within Treering's text editor. Users must manually highlight text and then click the corresponding formatting button in the toolbar. This adds unnecessary clicks to every edit and slows down the process for students used to standard keyboard workflows.

**As a side note, the Treering support staff has been incredibly helpful and generally easy to reach, with hold times rarely exceeding five minutes. That said, there were a few instances where the initial support representative was a non-native English speaker with a strong accent, which occasionally made communication difficult and led to some misunderstandings.

Bottom Line: While Treering may work for schools needing a basic, plug-and-play solution with a low learning curve, it is not well-suited for teams seeking detailed design control, collaborative efficiency, or consistent formatting. Many of its features feel underdeveloped or outright broken, making the editing process more frustrating than it should be—especially for students learning to lead and create.

Easy to use. Cost was reasonable. Quick shipping.