💬 Most asked question: WHERE DO I START?
I can help you: Family Memory Book Edition (applies to family yearbooks, and any family-related memory book)
1. Decide how many years you’d like your book to span. It might be one year, it might be two, five, even a decade. You might create a book covering a two year period now and the next one might cover five years. You make the rules, they don’t need to be the same.
2. Don’t try to fit it ALL into one book. It will become overwhelming really quickly, and you are more likely to give up. Keep it simple and focused. If there are a few years where you went on several holidays, consider making a dedicated Holidays book for those years.
3. Set yourself a realistic deadline for when you’d like the book to be ready.
4. Now, where are your photos? Phone? GoPro? SD cards? Hard drive? Emails? It will help if you can bring everything to the same place, like Google Drive.
5. Have a think about other material you might include. Kids’ artwork, photos from school portals, scanned memorabilia, QR codes to video links? (For scanning, use free apps such as Scannable or Adobe Scan.)
6. Now we get to photo selection. This bit might take some time, be patient and keep at it (even if it’s over a few days... or weeks!) Don’t fuss too much about it being your final selection, we’ll come to that later. I like to create folders for photos that I want to use in my books. I name them “1 - Jan,” “2 - Feb” so that they stay in order and are easy to use when creating my book. (You don’t have to do this if you don’t care about them being in a particular order within your book). Choose photos that “speak” to you, ones that make you smile, trigger a warm memory, take you back. If you’re not sure about a photo, add it - It will be a big collection to begin with.
7. Now it’s time to cull. This is the point when you decide about those photos you weren’t 100% sure about, where you choose the best out of three (or ten!) similar photos you couldn’t make your mind up about before, whittle the selection down to around 30 photos per month. Less is also fine!
8. If you are going to have me create your memory book for you, this would be the point where you hand it all over to me. I would create an online folder which I give you access to, and you just drag and drop your finalised folders into it.
9. If you are going to create the book yourself, choose your printer (there may be different ways you’d need to design the book depending on where you’re getting it printed), and have fun designing!
10. My final tip... don’t become obsessed with perfection. These are your family memories… they are going to be raw and rough and real, and by no means perfect. You want your memory book to look great, but you also want it to be something familiar that you’d often pick up and leaf through, revisiting those beautiful family memories.
