Telling Your Year in a Photo Book

Careful planning

Unlike photo books focusing on single events, a yearly photo book not just has to cover an entire year, but summarize it too at the same time. Therefore, it must be carried out very carefully by putting together the book gradually: at the end of each month, select your best pictures, jot down ideas for quotes, stories to tell or anything else that comes to your mind, and put them into a folder on your computer, marking the exact date they were created.

To be able to have a good selection of pictures, make sure to have a camera, smartphone or tablet on standby, while captions, stories, quotes can be saved anywhere you can find them later (ergo Facebook posts, blog articles, emails are all welcome). As for the nature of pictures and captions, they are completely up to you: the only condition is that pictures should focus on moments that are special and worth remembering, while captions shouldn’t be anything cliché (unless it perfectly describes the moment).

Why do we emphasize the importance of building your book as you live the moments? Because the undeniable advantage thereof is that by the end of the year, you will have your book’s material ready to be immediately printed in a book, but, of course, you have the option to modify your ideas later if you think a particular moment is captured by something better. Furthermore, you can skip this whole collecting pictures and ideas in advance thing and start working on your yearly photo book in late December or next January. This way you have it ready to show it off to your friends and loved ones while talking about the past year during a New Year’s drink.