Making a photobook for Christmas

Every year I make a photobook for Christmas. It’s generally a gift that I make for my family, but it’s also a way for me to store and archive some of the best photos we took over the past year. So we can remember these moments years later.

As all parents know, time flies and kids grow up quickly. Too quickly.

I have changed my process for making these photobooks over the years. Here I will document how I did it last. Both so I can remember how to do it again next year, but also, perhaps it helps others do the same.

Tools

I used to take photos with a DSLR Camera with many heavy lenses and Lightroom to process RAW photos. Which I had to store on a NAS. This was cumbersome and is now a thing of the past.

I now take all of my photos with my iPhone. It’s much lighter and quality has gotten to be good enough, especially for the weight! All the photos are automatically backed to the cloud and synchronized across all my devices.

For the photobook itself, after using Blurb, I now use Printique. I find their quality higher and their “flat books” are wonderful. Their book software is web based, it directly connects to Lightroom to sync photos, which is super convenient.

Process

Steps look like this:

1. Create a Smart Album on Mac, with a filter to include photos from Nov 16th last year, to Nov 15th this year. This is because I typically work on this over thanksgiving to have it ready for Christmas.
2. I create another Album (Photobook ‘current year’) and copy the photos in there. Photos are not actually duplicated. But the Smart Album only works on Macs. So I transfer everything to a simple Album, that is then synchronized across laptop, ipad and iphone.
3. In the Album, I take several passes to reduce the number of photos. I’ll for example start with 1200ish photos and get down to the best 400. The first pass will focus on removing the clearly bad photos, and the later passes will be more nitpicky and aim to keep the best and most memorable photos - this is more subjective and can take more time.
4. Once I get down to a manageable number of photos, I take a pass to edit them. Color balance, Framing, Filters, etc.
5. Once I’m happy, I import the photos into the Lightroom iOS app. This is helpful for the next step. I use Printique for making the photobook, and it can directly interface with lightroom to pull up my photos without requiring me to manually upload them.
6. On Printique I go with their default: Layflat Hardcover Photo Books, 10x10 in Luster. It goes up to 100 pages and can be delivered in a nice gift box.

TipRecommended size

100 pages makes for a heavy and large book. I would recommend sticking to 50 pages max, and splitting into multiple books if you have more content.

7. I will first automatically import all my photos and let Printique do a first pass at laying them out in the book. I will then go through every page and make adjustments. I find that this generally works OK. It’s easier to modify something to make it better, than starting from a blank slate.

Then that’s about it, once happy, order it and enjoy it!

/lcp