Creating A Family Album - Part 1 | Irwin, PA Photographer

It turns out – I have quite a bit to say on this topic! So, I’ve decided to split this post into two parts instead of writing an entire book in just one post.
This first post talks about the logistics & the “how” of putting together a family album – the next post will talk about the “why” behind the process!

Putting Together a Family Yearbook Album by Pittsburgh PA Photographer

I have been wanting to put together a “Family Yearbook” style photo album for several years now. In fact, just to prove that point – I have folders on my Desktop titled: “2016 Family Album”, “2017 Family Album”, and “2018 Family Album” – in other words, I have been attempting to do this since 2016!! I knew the first step was gathering all of my images together – so I created a central place to put them (thus the folders on my Desktop), but unfortunately, every single year, that’s pretty much as far as I got.

Until this year.

This year – I put it in my “yearly goals” to create & print a Family Yearbook to cover our year 2019. It was a massive goal, but I knew if I actually put it into writing & published it as a “goal”, that I would be more likely to accomplish it.

From start to finish, the entire process took me about 3 months to complete. Now, to clarify, I did not work on it every single day – but I did work on it at least 3-4 evenings a week. I also took about 2-3 weeks off in the middle of that 3 month period, because I was working on designing a wedding album. Needless to say, it was a long process.

But I learned a ton along the way – and looking forward to next year – the process should be much shorter.

I wanted to share all the details about the process of putting together a Family Yearbook, in case you also would like to put one together! Yes, it’s a massive project, but in the end, it is totally worth it!

Where To Print

For starters: I printed my book thru an online company called Blurb. The whole reason making a Family Yearbook was even on my radar was because one of my photography heroes, Katelyn James, prints a Family Yearbook for her family every year, and she uses Blurb to do so. There are so many album companies out there, and the thought of researching thru all of them was overwhelming. When I heard good things about Blurb, I decided to just go for it! And the printed results are fantastic.

Note: this album is 100% completely different from the wedding albums I create for my brides & grooms. My wedding albums are leather bound, they lay flat, and are made up of hard, thick pages. They are definitely a luxury product & are a much different quality than this album from Blurb.

Step 1: The Images

My first step was pulling all of my favorite images from 2019. I don’t have a total number, but I figure I easily took around 30,000 images of my family in 2019. That’s a lot of images to go thru & pick out my favorites for an album!

Now, I decided that I wanted to compile everything into one book. I know some photographers who just include images they took with their DSLR in a family album. I also know some photographers who create “mini” books with the trips they take – that way their family album isn’t bloated with a lot of traveling photos. I decided that I wanted to put everything together: iPhone photos and DSLR photos, photos of us doing regular life and photos of us on vacation. That decision meant that I ended up with a massive book – but I’m getting ahead of myself.

One of the things I did last year that was massively helpful in moving this process along was: I kept up with the editing of my personal DSLR photos as I went. That meant – instead of picking out my favorite images & then having to edit them – those images were already ready to go & I simply had to pick the best-of-the-best for the album. That easily saved me a few weeks worth of time. Additionally, I made the decision not to do any additional color-correcting on my iPhone images (with one or two exceptions). I decided that they all looked (generally) pretty good straight out of camera and so I just went with it – which again, saved me a ton of time.

Step 2: The Design

Once I had chosen all of my favorite images from January thru December, I then sat down to design my album. Blurb has their own album designing software & I tried it out – it just wasn’t my favorite. I already have an album designing program that I’m very familiar with (because I use it to design wedding albums), so I made the decision to design my album in AlbumStomp. If you don’t have a way to design an album – Blurb’s software is the perfect option!

Designing my album didn’t take me too long – but what did take some time was saving all of the pages I’d created. Unlike my wedding album company, Blurb wanted the pages saved as individual pages – not complete spreads. I didn’t realize this, so I ended up having to process & save everything twice. Then, on top of everything, my files ended up being way too large to upload to Blurb. So, I had to figure out how to resize my .pdf files – and all of that took some time.

Step 3: The Ordering Process

One of my favorite things about Blurb is that they are almost always offering some sort of discount code! I had heard that the highest discount they offer was 40%, and a lot of people said that once they had their album designed, they would just save it until a 40% off code was presented. Thankfully, I didn’t have to wait long, as literally the day after I finished my album, I received a 40% off code in my email from Blurb!

In total, my album ended up being 386 pages. I had it printed as a 12×12 hardcover book on standard paper. The total price for my book was $302.49, but with my 40% off code, it brought the final price down to $188.48 (can we just talk about how AMAZING that discount is?!)

The ordering process with Blurb was incredibly simple. After uploading the files, you are able to preview everything – from the cover thru every individual page. I would be lying if I said that pressing the “order” button on such a massive book wasn’t terrifying! I wanted to pass out – it was so scary!

Blurb printed my book incredibly fast – faster than their estimated timeframe! And, after anxiously watching the tracking every single day, my book finally arrived at my house.

I am absolutely obsessed with how it turned out!! The quality is simply beautiful & I am thrilled beyond words with how it turned out. I love that I now have a tangible book that I can hold, that includes all of my family’s memories from 2019. As I flip thru the pages, almost every single image brings back memories and stories surrounding what was going on in that photo.

I am so proud of this project!!