Family Year Books
Making family books has been on my mind for a long time and last summer I finally made it happen and got one book done. We have so many wonderful memories, many of which happen during our homeschool days, so I have wanted to get all our pictures into one place we can easily reflect back on. When I shared about it on IG I had a lot of questions on how I organized everything. So today I’m sharing some really simple details about how I pulled it all together and the easy and simple template I am going to use going forward.
Organizing Photos & Videos
I take a lot of pictures because of IG & blogging. On one hand I am so grateful for this because I have captured so much. On the other, it made for a lot of work to organize. There is no getting around the fact that making a photo book is a lot easier with organized photos though. It takes some effort to get everything put together in a way that’s easier to plug into a process and this step takes time, but once you do it, it’s totally worth it.
Choose a “home” for your photos. This way they have a permanent place to live. You may like to store them on your computer, the cloud, Dropbox, Amazon photos, ect. We store all of ours on an external hard drive and have been very happy with the SanDisk (1TB). I actually just keep this plugged into my computer so it’s always easy for me to access my photos and videos.
Move all your files from phone or camera. Organizing on your desktop is much easier than on your phone or camera so move everything to the place you decided to have as their home. By the way, if you’re using a digital camera - always make sure to have the date set correctly because it’ll make this process so much easier!
Create a storage system and begin organizing. Now you’re going to want to create a system to plug photos into. I suggest organizing first by year then to month then to file type. (2023 > December > JPG).
Depending on your phone or camera, you may have slightly different file types. I have 5 sub folders for file type: HEIC, JPG, Movie, AAE, and For the Book. But, you can organize however is easiest for you.
On this step, make sure to utilize the computer to help you organize by clicking the “date modified” or “kind” files so it automatically groups like file types together or organizes them by year. Then it’s really easy to drag and drop into the right folder.
Slim Down. Once all my photos are divided up by year and month, I go into file type for my HEIC and JPG and get rid of any photos I know I don’t want to save - like the 100 pictures one of my kids might’ve taken of the wall. Or, if I took 10 family photo shots - I cut it down to the best 1-2 photos. You could also do this for videos, but I haven’t gotten there yet!
Copy photos to a photo book file. After the initial clean-up I go back through again and pick the photos I know I want to go into our photo book. This step goes really quickly because I’ve already cleaned everything up. I pull up two finder windows which makes it easy for me to copy and paste photos from one folder to another. You definitely want to make duplicates here so it’s always easy to go back and find pictures you may be looking for later. For our 2022 book, I did this for the entire year before I even opened up and started working on the photo book. But, if you’re caught up, this would be easy to do once a month to have it ready to go.
Back-up. On a final note here, I thought I better just put a plug in to back- up photos. It’s ideal to store photos and videos two layers deep so that if something happens to one, you have a backup. IE store it on your computer and also an external hard drive.
If this part intimidates you, you can also check out Miss Freddy, a professional photo organizer who I’ve heard fantastic things about. She can organize your photos for you or she also has some more in-depth courses about organizing if you need those.
Creating a Photo Book
I asked the hive mind on IG which photo book company they would recommended and it was pretty split between Shutterfly and Mixbook so you probably can’t go wrong with either. We tried Chatbooks a few years ago and I was not impressed with their quality of printing and years later, we have multiple pages falling out of our book. So this time around I decided to try Mixbook and I am very happy with it. I almost went with a lay flat book, but ultimately decided against it because I wanted a thinner book and I am so glad I did. I think years and years of really thick books are not ideal. Also, the printing quality with Mixbook is nice which was my main must-have so I am going to stick with them to catch up on our other books.
What I ordered:
Square
Hardcover - Matte
Small 8.5 x 8.5 size
Every day semi-gloss paper
I think I started with the Minimal White template (under Simple Photobooks), but then I changed some things and made it work for what I wanted. I landed on organizing the book with a one page overview of what we did each month. I made this page once and then duplicated it for the rest of the book and just changed on the month’s name. Then, following each monthly written overview I used Mixbook’s collage templates to display all our photos from that month. This worked really well to keep it simple and doable! All I did was open the file on my computer for the month I was working in and drag the files into Mixbook. They’ll do an auto collage for you, if you’d like, but I preferred customizing my own just using their templates. Our book ended up being about 100 pages and I think that’ll be a realistic expectation for other years as well. Remember, I take a lot of photos though, so yours may not be nearly as long. At the beginning of the book I also added a headshot of each of my kids and their favorites for the year - favorite movie, color, food, show, restaurant, toy, and thing they learned about. For current years I really want to add a handwriting sample so I am planning to do that this year.
I think getting to this point and getting one book done is the hardest, but now going forward I have a great template for later books. I’ll just be able to duplicate the entire book and go in and edit the months and swap out pictures.
I hope this helps inspire you and gets you going for your own family year books! I think documenting and keeping a record of our lives is so important. And, it’s so important for kids - it helps them develop a sense of self and hold onto memories that their little minds may forget. My kids already love to look back through our book. They’ve flipped through it over and over and over. Keep me posted if you decide to do a book, I’d love to see it and let me know if you have any questions!
Other Posts You May Like: