The "book" creation software is beyond me plus it is limited to 100 pictures..
That is not quite right. The limit is 100 pages, not 100 photos. And the limit only applies, if you want to have your book printed by Apple. If you only want to create a pdf file to print yourself, your book can have as many pages as you want.
Also, depending on the book theme you are using, you can add more than one image to a page. For example, the Stock-book theme lets you place up to eight photos onto one page.
There other themes, that allow more than one photo per page, just browse the available themes.
For example, a "Proof-Book" with more than 1000 pages:
How large do you want to print the photos in your hardcopy album? And do you need captions or annotations with tags?
The Print dialogue has many templates as well to print more than one image at once.
Regards
Léonie