RTW Travel Photobook Progress
By the time we returned home from our crazy backpacking adventure, I knew I wanted to make a photobook in addition to a crafty scrapbook. Something classic and minimal. No embellishment. Just the photos and writing, hardbound with lush paper and coffee-table worthy. Something we could keep for ages and point to and remember you know that year we just dropped everything and hit the road? Let’s look at that again. And so, that book is coming to be.
When I exported all the photos from the drive we used on the road to the computer I use at home, I accidentally didn’t import all the organisation I had kept along the way. Gone were all my lovely divided events and tags and all that stuff. (I have since figured out what I did wrong but it just wasn’t worth doing all that again.) Instead of everything divided by noteworthy event and location, it was just one big batch of 9000 photographs in chronological order.
And actually, that is working tremendously well.
I’m using the same album format that Liz of Paislee Press used for this book, mostly because I loved her book so much that I instantly knew that was what I wanted. Originally I figured I could create all the templates myself, but then I kept putting it off. Now I’m using the templates from Paislee Press and I’m actually getting this done. I love that I can just open a double page spread of templates, go over to iPhoto and choose the right number of pictures and drag them over to make the pages. Because I have all the photos in one big batch, the number of photos on the templates is helping me edit which pictures to include. If there are eight photos on the next set of templates, then I look at my library and pick the next eight I want to share, in chronological order. I’m using plain white page backgrounds and one font throughout the entire book. The words are coming from a mix of my blog posts from the road, the handwritten journal I kept along the trip and my reflections now. The writing is quite therapeutic and calming, though at times it really makes me wish we were on the road again soon. In a wistful sort of way.
I’m making the pages one double-page spread at the time, then importing them to Blurb’s BookSmart book builder. I save each page as both a PSD and a JPG (just in case I catch a typo or want to change something later) and then I just upload the JPG to BookSmart, click to add a new page (1 photo – full bleed) and drag the JPG page onto the right page in the book. There may be some more efficient way of building the book, but this is pretty quick and I like being able to see it come together page by page. (The images here are the first five double-page spreads in the book.)
The completed book will be 8×10 and hardback, and Blurb will go to a maximum of 160 pages with their premium paper in that size. That’s what Liz used and I am totally doing the same. I’ve used the premium paper in smaller hardback books from Blurb and I love it – but I haven’t made a book quite this epic yet, so I am tremendously excited to see it become real. It’s definitely getting there now and I’m really enjoying putting it together and revisiting all those amazing places by looking through all the pictures.
And by posting it here, you can keep me accountable and make sure I get this completed sooner rather than later! You’ll hold me to that, right?
…something that just might be useful
If you’ve been meaning to make a photo book yourself, this week is a fab time to do that because Blurb are offering 20% off the book prices with code BLURB20 but that expires at the end of the month, which isn’t very long now! But with a set of templates – be they from a digital scrapbooking site or the drop-in templates at Blurb – you can make a photobook in just an hour or two. It just depends on how decisive you can be as you add photos and elements! If you like pages with a bit more ‘stuff’ than the templates I’m using, there are several options in different styles here – especially if you scroll to the bottom half of the page. You can also create notebooks with your favourite images on the cover and plenty of space to write. Could be a lovely Christmas gift if you’re already thinking of December! (Oh my!)
xlovesx
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