Making the book
How to choose 10 photos out of 1,000
You have three thousand photos from this year and space for ten. Most people solve this by not choosing at all, which is how photo books don't get made. Here is a way through that takes about five minutes.
One per moment
Phones take photos in bursts. Twelve near-identical shots of the birthday cake are one moment, not twelve. Scroll your camera roll and pick the single best from each cluster. That alone cuts a thousand photos to a hundred.
Faces beat scenery
A grandparent will look at a slightly blurred photo of a grandchild's face for a full minute and turn past a perfect sunset in a second. Choose photos where you can see who people are.
Ordinary beats impressive
Holidays and graduations get photographed and shared anyway. What nobody sends is the Tuesday: the school uniform, the kitchen table, the dog on the sofa. Those are the pictures someone far away is actually missing.
Check each one would survive a caption
If you can say one true sentence about a photo, it belongs in the book. "Mia's first day. She insisted on the yellow gumboots." If all you can say is "here's another one from the beach", leave it out.
A quick checklist for the final ten
- One with the person the book is for, if you have it.
- One of each child on their own.
- One of everyone together.
- Two or three of ordinary life.
- One that makes you laugh.
- One old one, for contrast.
Mix the shapes
A book with both upright and sideways photos has more rhythm than one with only landscapes. Upright photos fill our page almost completely; sideways ones sit in the upper half with room for a longer caption.
Let the phone help
On an iPhone, the photos you've marked with a heart are a head start: open Albums and look in Favourites. The Paper Chain iPhone app, currently in testing, goes a step further and ticks ten suggestions from the last month for you, looking for favourites, faces and one photo per moment.
Use the original from your camera roll, not a copy that's been through a chat app. Copies are often shrunk and print soft. More on that in why chat-app photos print blurry.