Collect your Photos

Once you have chosen a publisher, you will need to collect the photos that you want to use when you make your photo book. You should use the photographs at the size they come off the camera, as this will give you the highest resolution. Don’t resize them. The photo book software will handle scaling and you will get best results if you start out with a high resolution image. If you try to use an image with a resolution so low that it will look poor in the final book, the photo book software will warn you. Some photo book software includes basic photo editing and correction tools, like red eye removal and rotation, but any serious editing should be done using photo editing software before you begin to make your photo book.

Next, you should group your photos into pages. You may want to place some photos on a page of their own while you might prefer to group others together on a page. You can usually place ten or even more small photos on a single page. A good tip when you are planning to make you photo book is to indicate the page that you want to put a photo on in it’s filename. For example, if you have a photo named baby-matthew1.jpg that will appear on page 3,  rename it to 3-baby-natthew1.jpg before you upload or import it into the photo book software. That way you can order the photos by name and have them listed in page order and you can easily tell from the name where you planned to put each one. And if you use a Storyboard tool to create your book quickly (Picaboo and Shutterfly both offer this), this will make it go even faster.

Remember that you can use any image in jpeg format as a photograph (or background if the publisher supports it). You can scan items like childrens drawings or tickets, programs or other paper items to use in photo memory books. You can also use photographs from the web, but some might be subject to copyright. Creative Commons is a good source of copyright-free images.  Flickr supports Creative Commons licensing and allows you to search for those images. Creative Commons is a type of license that allow people to use the work freely for non-commercial purposes (some types of Creative Commons license also allow commercial use and modification of the work). Go to the Flickr Advanced Search page and select the Creative Commons options near the bottom to find images you can use.