Tips for creating your family photobooks

My goal at the end of each year with all of my personal photos of our family is to put together a yearly photobook. I have done one for 2018 which our whole family LOVES (let's not talk about 2015/2016/2017 though OK?) and am in the process of working on 2019 and so I wanted to share a few tips with you that I have learnt along the way -

My five year old daughter LOVES looking through our family photobooks - Image credit: Kylie Purtell

📔 DON’T OVERTHINK IT

It took me ages to get started with creating photobooks for my kids because I wasn’t sure if I should do a separate personalised photobook for each child, or if I should create separate photobooks for special events or holidays… Then I questioned if I should have one book for i-phone photos and another for my camera photos. I was making the whole process WAY too complicated. In the end I decided I wanted to make it as simple as possible and not spend all my waking hours on it, and so I opted for creating one family photobook each year (including all of my camera and i-phone photos)

💻v📱 WORK FROM YOUR COMPUTER OR PHONE
My personal preference is to put together photobooks from my computer - but that’s mainly becuase I’m working with photos from my camera AND iphone - if you are only printing photos from your phone, many companies have mobile apps that enable you to create your photobooks directly from your phone. I use Blurb for my family photobooks and although I work from my desktop, they also have a mobile app

**TIP** If you’re working from your i-phone, use the “favourite” button (see my screenshots below to see how to do this) to select the images you want to include in your photobook. That automatically moves those photos into a “favourites” album and then you have all of your photobook-worthy shots in the one place, instead of having to constantly go back and scroll through thousands of photo.

📅 CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

I try to have a loose chronological order in my photobooks. I sort my photos on a month by month basis (see my previous blog post on how to organise your family photos here), so although I don’t worry too much about the days, I do try to keep all the photos from one month together – I love being able to flick through a photobook and watch how my kids have grown throughout that year. In saying that, if the task of organising your photos chronologically is holding you back from printing your photos or you don’t know the dates of your photos, I would say let it go and just put the photos in that make you happy!

🎨 EDIT

You don’t need fancy editing software like Lightroom or Photoshop, you can easily do this from your phone if that’s where the majority of your photos are taken– I find that most i-phone photos just need a bit of an increase in brightness, vibrancy and then play around with the highlights/shadows… (photos often come out darker in print then they will display on your phone - I turn the brightness of my screen down to around 80% when I’m editing to get a better idea of what the image will look like printed) Of course, you can always use filters and there are many editing apps that do this… but my top tip here is don’t overdo it and embrace your natural skin tones!! I know the orange skin filter is *so hot right now* but I wonder if our kids might look at some of their baby photos in 20 years’ time and wonder why they’re so damn orange!?

✂BE RUTHLESS

I have printed photobooks in the past where I included *every.single.photo* that my kids looked cute in... the result!? A ridiculously large book with waaaay too many photos in it, that even I got bored looking through. So, now I only include the very BEST photos, my absolute favourites or the ones that tell a story of my kids childhood!

For more tips on how to best organise your family photos, click here to check out my previous blog post

🖍 DESIGN

I know there are SO many design options when you are creating a photobook these days – colourful borders, photo filters, special effects and all sorts of shapes/frames/collages to display your photos in. My advice, ditch all the fancy effects and *keep it simple*. All of the effects just end up dating really quickly, they can look tacky but the main thing is they distract from the whole point of the photobook – your photos!

📝 CAPTIONS

I decided not to include any text in my photobooks when designing them. Again, this was purely because I knew it was going to take me WAY too long to do, and I just wanted them printed. I decided that I would handwrite my captions into the book (which, full disclosure, I haven’t done… yet) but including text is really easy to do if you choose to.

❤ ORDER YOUR BOOK
Last but not least, order your book and wait for that exciting delivery day! As I mentioned, I use Blurb and I pay a little bit extra to get the niiiiice paper - I get the Mohawk Superfine Eggshell (previously called ProLine Uncoated Paper) as it seriously does make a difference! Also, Blurb are constantly having sales, so just a little tip, don’t ever pay full price!! Sign up for their mailing list and you can often get 35-40% off the book, you just need to be patient :)

I hope this helps you to get started with putting together & printing your own family photobooks! As always, if you have any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!