How to Create Your Family Album » Living Life with Meredith

There are a few (okay, technically 9) steps I take to create our family album & I’m going to share them all, plus a few secrets, with you now.

One of my favorite things to do is to create these family albums. In all honesty, I tend to complete the previous year’s book when I’m at least a few months, if not half the year or more into the next one. Why I do that I have no idea. But either way, the book gets done & I love working on it & pouring myself, our photos, & memories into it. I hope you’re able to create your own, however you choose, & are able to pour yourself into it to have to look back on the memories later.

My family & I love to look back on these books not only when it first comes in the mail but also years later. We tend to forget all that happens in a year, especially years down the road, so these books have become something really special for my family—including my extended family. Especially after losing loved ones, these books/photos/stories have become all the more cherished.

Think about it…every year in school, you purchase a yearbook that documents that year of life for you. These books are the same thing but for your family. It’s filled with the random, every day photos along with the family vacations & holidays that are shared each year.

Let’s get started!

Step 1: The first step I take is to make sure my photos are organized. I download all of the photos from my iCloud that I’m going to use & organize those as well.

Step 2: I go through each folder of photos & select exactly which photos I’m going to use to create my family album. Disclaimer here is that sometimes I add more photos to my “Use” folder than I actually end up using & sometimes I go back and add more in as I’m working on the book. It’s not an exact science. The photos I select for my “Use” folder are the ones that I think I want to use to document/tell the story of the event. Sometimes some don’t fit or aren’t actually necessary & sometimes I feel the need to swap some photos or add some. My advice is to just choose the photos that you like best that will tell the story of the event and ultimately, your year.

Step 3: Before I even start the book, I choose the cover photos: front & back. They are the same type every year. The cover is of my whole family & the back is of me, my mom, & sister. We typically only get 1-3 of those a year so I know where to find them & which ones I want to use.

Step 4: Open the software of your choice. I use Blurb & I have for each of my family’s albums. It gives me enough freedom to create the pages exactly how I want them to look but they also have layouts you can choose from.

This is the first page you’re going to see once you download Blurb’s software & click “New” inside the software. You can choose what type of book & what size. I always choose “Photo Books” & “Standard Landscape” size.

Once you make the choice of book & size, you’re going to choose the paper & cover that you’d like. I’ve always chosen the “Standard” paper option but they have 5 choices & you can ready about the differences here. Next choice is what type of cover. I prefer “Image Wrap”. The pictures are the cover. There’s not a dust jacket & it’s a hardback book.

On the next screen you’ll name your book. As you read through these steps you’ll see that I don’t title the book until the end but I give it the title of the year in the meantime because that’s what my books are all about! Here, you’ll also choose where to backup & save your book on your computer.

Let’s start creating the book!

Once you go through and select your book type, size, & paper and cover options, this is the screen that will open. You can see the pages on the left & the page that you’re on is in the middle ready for you to get to work!

Step 5: To begin, I upload the cover photos. There’s a button/tab at the top left that says “Covers” & you click there to work on the cover. You can add text and/or photos to the cover.

The first thing I do is create a page for the intro. For the last few years, I’ve started off the book with an introduction page where I write a short little paragraph about that year. I usually touch on what type of year it was for us & highlight some of the big things that happened.

This is the first page in the book & you can see in the middle the toolbox as I call it that gives you all the options for text. There’s one for photos too that features zoom, size of the photo, the option to rotate, etc.

Next, I start with the first event & upload those photos. Either choose from a layout & drag the photos into the image placeholders or if you can, which you can in Blurb, drag the image itself onto the page & resize and move it around from there to create your own layout. With the older Blurb software, I used to really utilize the layouts & edit them a little bit if I needed to (like making the images bigger/smaller, get them away from the edges) and only occasionally create my own layout. With the newer version of Blurb, I just create my own each time because the layouts aren’t the same. This is just my preference but the layouts are a GREAT tool especially when you’re first starting out. And also especially if you’re doing photos only. I add text to all of my pages. I put the dates & event name on the first page & I add captions or tell stories about the event as I put together each page.

There’s a tab for layouts at the top of the screen & you can see all of the layouts pre-designed for you. In the middle of the screen, you can see 2 that I’ve chosen.

I work on each event one at a time, in chronological order. It’s not always easy to do that but I’ve found that it’s the best way because you don’t always know how many pages you’re going to need for each event. For example, one year I decided to work on Thanksgiving & Christmas first because for me, those are always the biggest undertaking for the book & by the time I get to the end, I can be a little tired. Well, I got both of those holidays done & then went back to the beginning of the year & worked my way forward. When I got done with the book, I ended up having to go back to the vast majority of the holiday pages & re-adjust the layouts when they shifted from one side of the page to the other. Learn from me: work in chronological order.

Piece of Advice:

As you create each page, be mindful of the edges and seams. In Blurb, they give red guide marks to tell you where they may cut off the pages when they print and trim them. You want to be careful with pictures placed there because in Blurb, they occasionally (not always) trim the pages along those lines. I prefer to be careful and place them right on those guides so I don’t lose any of my image. If I didn’t care about the top of my image, I’d place it all the way to the top of the page and not worry about it. But also, the pages aren’t always trimmed along those guidelines so if you’re not consistent with where you place each image (along or below the guidelines or all the way at the top of the page) then you may notice differences on each page. Trust me when I say that it’s better to decide which way you want to go from the beginning & stick with it on each page. It’s not fun to have to go back and readjust each page when you’ve finished the book.

Get Creative!

Tell the event in a fun way!

For one vacation, I created the pages per day of the vacation instead of all lumped together as one big event and told the story that way. I know what you’re thinking: “Meredith. If I’m creating this book at the end of the year or the beginning of the next year, how in the world am I supposed to remember what I did on days 1-7 of my beach vacation I took in June?” Welllllll….I keep a journal. I write in it every day & that’s where I am able to go look for details of each day so I can remember what happened. If you’re creating a book from your phone photos, those have the dates that you took them so you can piece it together that way. (I would also recommend starting a journal/notebook where after each big event/holiday, you can write down some notes or stories to jog your memory of that day when you start to work on the book later.)

For one trip, I documented the event by each person’s perspective.

You could also throw all of the photos in the book per event & call it a day.

You could tell the event in chronological order of how the day took place.

You could place fun facts throughout each event. When I did this, fun facts were not necessarily important to telling the story. For example, when I worked on the pages for the Carrie Underwood concert that I went to, I put the dates in there, where it took place, that we had so much fun and used more adjectives to describe the concert, and put the photos in there. For the fun facts, I added that we got tired of waiting in the hotel shuttle because of traffic so we walked back to the hotel which involved walking up a steep grassy hill. Or that we ended up missing the first act because we were eating dinner. Those aren’t crucial to the story but they add some fun to the story & they’re funny things to look back on & remember.

You could also tell Blurb to auto-create the book. If you do this, it will put one image on each page. If that’s what you want, then auto-create is a great option for you. For me, I usually put multiple pictures on one page & add text to most pages so auto-create isn’t the option for me. 🙂

Random Leftover Photos?

Step 6: At this point, you’ve created the entire book per event (go you!). If you’re like me, you have random images leftover that you thought you’d use for each event but didn’t & you may also have random photos that really don’t belong anywhere like that cute photo you took of your dog sleeping in a weird position or that selfie you took when you and your sister were running errands. I put all of those photos in a section at the end. They’re thrown in on each page in no particular order & unless they really need a caption, I don’t add it.

Name It!

Step 7: I don’t do anything half way so just labeling the album by the year was not enough for me. Each year I give the book a title that describes the year. I HAVE to do this at the end for multiple reasons. One, I struggle with giving the book a title & end up recruiting my entire family to help me with it. Second, it helps to have perspective on the year once you put the whole book together. If you’re looking for some ideas, here’s a list:

-The Circle of Life

-Same People, Different Adventures

-What a Year!

-Joy Through the Seasons

-Days of Our Lives

-Sweet Family Time

-Moments in Time

Time to Review Your Book!

Step 8: Look through the book you just created one more time & make sure it’s ready to go. Things to look for: grammar (Blurb does have a spelling checker but beware it catches anything & everything (like the name of my town or the name we call my grandfather (Pa)), pictures on the wrong pages, things not lined up right, pictures along the edges in the cutoff portion, or if a page just doesn’t look right & needs some editing (it happens, trust me). Scroll back up to step 5 if you need a refresh on the edges & seams of the pages.

You’re done! You did it!

Step 9: Order that book & get ready to hold it in your hands in a week or two. Trust me, it feels so good!

ALLLLL of the books I’ve created. The most recent, 2018, (still working on 2019) is in the middle. For the first 2 years of the book & then randomly in 2015, I put the year on the cover but I stopped doing that & just put it on the spine of the book.

This guide seems like a lot & like these books are a lot of work but it’s something I truly enjoy doing each year. Once you get the hang of it, it’s like riding a bike! I promise! & then these memories are all in one place for you to have forever.

YAY! I hope you’re able to find this guide useful regardless of what software/company you use or even if you create your album by scrapbooking (I used to do that & love it!). Let me know in the comments below if you’re a scrapbooker of any kind (have you completed your 2019 book yet?! I haven’t!) or if you’re looking to try it out now. I want to hear!

Love,