Free Photo Book + Tips to Keep Design Simple
I love making photo books, particularly when I have a large collection of photos from things like vacations, birthday parties and family photo shoots.
After making dozens of photo books here are a few tricks I have learned for keeping the process simple.
Select your photos in advance: This makes a huge difference. Don’t upload all 1,000 photos from your vacation. Take a bit of time to select all the bests and just upload those. It will make a big difference when you put together your photo book.
Stick with one book theme: Photo books sites like Shutterfly and Snapfish offer a plethora of themes for your books. Select a theme and stick with it. Don’t try to make the theme better by inserting other backgrounds, decorations, etc. It will slow down your process.
Don’t add a bunch of embellishments: While embellishments can be fun, selecting, inserting and resizing them can take a lot of time and bog down your book’s design. So use them sparingly or not at all in your book. I usually find that my photos + words are enough.
Use the photo templates provided: Though once in a while you might need to tweak a template, 99% of the time, you can make the templates provided work. The photo website has done the hard work for you. Just drag and drop those pictures.
Keep your fonts consistent: Use the same font, size and color throughout the book. Again, doing lots of changes will slow down your book making process.
This week Shutterfly is offering all customers a free 8×8 hardcover photo book with the code FREETREAT.
For more photo book inspiration:
Tips for creating birthday photo books
5 tips for creating a photo book FAST
Disclosure: Some links in this post are compensated affiliate links
Love photobooks. Planning on using the code for the free photo book to make a Christmas Gift from my mother in law with picture from our family summer vacation.
Can you tell me about how many photos I should choose to do an 8×8 book? Thanks
That depends on what kind of style you like- lots of photos that are small, or fewer photos that are larger? I would say I typically do 3-6 photos a spread, so 30-60 photos in a book. I might do one more heavy spread, particularly for something like a birthday party book. It really is preference though.