Most of us have loads of family photos stored in paper albums, on our computers and phones or in cloud storage services. How about selecting the best ones and putting together a unique family photo album? Designed with care and love, such an album will become a mine of memories and positive emotions, a precious heirloom for your children and grandchildren, and an excellent gift for a wedding anniversary or other important family celebration. Better still, the very process of creating a photo album can be an exciting and unifying pastime for the whole family.
In this article, we’re going to give you six tips to help you create an attractive, original photo album, rich in memories and telling an exciting story.
Sort Out Your Photos
The first and most important stage is to decide which photos you want to include in your album. You may opt for a yearly family album or for the one dedicated to some special event like a wedding or a holiday or to some special person.
Gather all the pics of the chosen period in one folder and then look through them, deleting those that are bad quality, lack of interest or are repetitive and place those you absolutely want to see in your album in special folders.
This way, not only will you put some order in your photo archives, but you will have some ideas about the layout of your future album. Try to choose the most significant pictures and the ones that evoke the most positive emotions in you. If you are preparing an album representing the whole family, make sure that each member is adequately featured.
Be Creative
Browse through the photos you’ve just selected for your album. You’re sure to find some you could improve by adding fun stickers or by replacing their backgrounds to create cool montages. For example, you could take virtual trips to the Moon or Mars, to the bottom of the ocean or inside your favourite film.
Replacing the background could also help you visualise your dreams by representing yourself in front of a monument you’d like to visit but haven’t had the chance yet, like the Eiffel Tower or the pyramids of Egypt. In short, be creative and imaginative, and ask your children for advice – they’re sure to have some amazing ideas. And you can use a free tool to easily change the photo background online – just follow the link above.
Choose The Support For Your Photo Album
There are basically two main ways of creating a family photo album: to prepare your photo book digitally using some ready-made templates available in many special programs or online services like Mixbook and then have it printed or to make a classic paper album. This one feels warmer to me, more authentic and personalised like any piece of homemade art, whereas a printed photo book looks more professional.
On the other hand, creating a photo album on your computer may be easier, because you can freely vary the sizes of the photos and add any backgrounds, frames and other embellishments as well as use any fonts you like. So choose the option which is best for you.
Make Interesting Lay Out
Whatever medium you choose, to make your album more captivating, you’d better organise it well. First, think about dividing it into chapters and giving each one a title. These could be different events, places, months or seasons, depending on the theme of your album. For each chapter, choose the most significant photo and enlarge it. Don’t forget about the cover.
While presenting a particular episode or day, you can put a key photo in the centre of the page, group together several photos with the same theme, and vary the sizes and angles to make your album more captivating. A good idea is to alternate individual and group photos, portraits and landscapes.
Add Significant Captions
Think about inserting various captions to communicate the date and place where the photo was taken, peoples’ names, funny or moving comments for certain photos, anecdotes, memories or quotations linked to them. This will help you preserve your memories and provide more information about the chosen episodes of your family history.
As for text style, you may want it to be discrete and classic or artistic and unusual, matching your album design. Just find the right balance between images and texts and make it readable and purposeful.
Decorate Your Album
To make your pictures stand out, you can decorate them with simple or fancy frames chosen from your software collection, cut from paper or drawn by hand. You can use the unique frame style for all of your pics or highlight only some of them. If you make a scrapbook style album, you can decorate it with ribbons, paper flowers, stickers and so on.
You could even enrich your family album with a few material mementoes like tickets to museums or boarding passes, tourist postcards or greeting cards, your children’s drawings, dried flowers, family recipes and so on. The important thing is to observe the sense of proportion and stick to the style you have chosen. Elegant minimalist-style photo albums are no less precious than eclectic scrapbooks.
Creating a family photo album is an enriching activity in itself, capable of uniting the old and the young alike. With a little inspiration, you can create more than just an album with photos and captions, but a real family treasure. You may be scared to take on the task given the amount of photos to sort through, but just start small by creating an album of photos from your latest family trip or the best photos from the past year, have a helping hand of your loved ones, try out different types of albums and ways to design them, and taking our tips into account, you may not want to stop.