We’re busy installing new pendant lights and will share photos tomorrow, but in the meantime we wanted to address a question we get all the time: how to store and preserve family photos. We became converts to photo books after seeing Katie Bower’s family book a few summers ago, and last year we created our first Family “Yearbook.” Now that another year has closed out, our newest volume just arrived.
The book is a single glossy volume with about 600 photos from our year, yet it’s only roughly a half-inch thick—much more compact than the traditional overstuffed albums that hold only a few hundred prints each. We ordered through MyPublisher and took advantage of a promotion for free extra pages, which let us reach their 100-page limit without paying more. That promotion saved us about $79, and even without the deal, printing hundreds of photos or buying multiple physical albums would have been far more expensive and bulky.
This year we planned ahead: we kept all our images in a single iPhoto album that preserved chronological order, so compiling the book only took a couple of weeks into the new year. For ease of browsing, we grouped major events, holidays, and milestones together—so birthday parties, holiday gatherings, and other special moments flow across multiple spreads rather than being scattered.
We customized the opening page with a short summary of the year, which is a great way to capture context at a glance. A one-page recap makes it easier to remember the highlights when you flip through the volume years from now.
Special photos got special layouts: preset page designs helped emphasize a few standout shots, including ones Katie B. took during our visit with the Bowers. Grouping images and using larger layouts for favorites helps break up the page flow and gives the book a polished, magazine-like feel.
We also made sure our dog Burger had his fair share of pages—every family album needs a few montages for the pet. Including a variety of subjects (kids, pets, travel, holidays) makes the book feel balanced and personal.
One fun idea was to include the photos we shot for our Blogiversary “Day in the Life” post in sequence. It creates a time capsule effect: years from now we’ll be able to flip to that spread and see what an ordinary day looked like back then.
We almost hit the 100-page limit when we reached Christmas, but we managed to prioritize and squeeze in a collage of holiday-card outtakes so nothing important was left out. Being selective with page placement and using collages for groupings are effective strategies when page counts are capped.
Now that we have two yearbooks on the shelf, we’re already excited to make a 2012 edition. In the meantime we’re thinking about going back and organizing older digital files to create one or two retrospective volumes covering 2005–2008—photos from when we met through the years right before our 2009 album begins. It’s a nice project for a rainy weekend or after a big deadline.
Are you creating photo books or albums to document a year, an event, or a particular period in your life? We’d love to hear how you organize your digital photos, what platforms or tools you use, and any tips for keeping a project manageable—especially when you’re trying to condense hundreds of images into a single, meaningful book.