Busy schedules combined with work and family time means that some things on our to do lists (like organising our photographs) never seem to get done. But it doesn’t have to be like that. We’ve put together a handy guide to show you how to create a beautiful bonusprint photo book in under an hour. Full of hints and tips for quick and easy photo booking, you don’t have to miss out on getting creative with your photos, even when time’s a bit tight.
Step 1: Plan your photo book (5 mins)
It’s always best to think of a theme for your book before you start; a recent trip, a year of photos, a party, or a work project. Then decide what size book you’d like to create, what format and how many pages – our most popular photo book is a large landscape one – but you can also choose from small to extra-large sizes, landscape, portrait, and square books, and have up to 120 pages.
Step 2: Get your photos into a folder on your computer (25 mins)
This is the most time-consuming part, but it’s fairly straight forward. Create a new folder on your computer and transfer the photos you want in your book from your camera, cloud storage, tablet, or phone to that new folder. For Android users, you can download them from Google Photos, and iPhone users can do the same from iCloud. You can also collect any from WhatsApp or your camera roll by connecting your phone to your computer with a USB cord. Then they’re all in the same place when you need to upload them.
When you’re transferring them into your new folder, it’s a good idea to sort out a naming convention for them and to delete any bad quality photos you don’t want. This will make it much easier to add the photos you do want into your photo book. If you need a little help getting your images into a folder and making sure they’re tidy, check out our photo organisation guides before you get started.
Step 3: Add your photos to your photo book (10 mins)
Downloading our easy-to-use editor will make things even simpler, but alternatively, you can create your photo book online.
Our downloadable editor is the one to try if you want to use our Smart Assistant tool. Smart Assistant will make the photo book creation process even quicker. It’ll select your best photos and then automatically create a photo book for you.
Once you’ve selected your editor, decide how to add your photos to your book – Smart Assistant on the downloadable editor is great if you want images added to layouts for you, but manually adding your photos will give you more control. Try to organise your pages chronologically or by image colour and style so that it’s faster and easier to choose photos for each page. The editor will mark how many times one of your photos has been added to your photo book in your list of images on the left-hand side. This will prevent you accidentally duplicating images (which is always easy to do with similar snaps). Remember, you can easily add pages to your photo book if you feel like you’re running out of space.
Step 4: Design your photo book (15 mins)
Now for the fun bit. Choose your cover first of all in the ‘options’ tab – you can use one of your photos as the cover or leave it blank (you can change your mind even after you’ve finished designing your photo book). Clicking on the ‘layouts’ tab will enable you to choose a quick and easy way to arrange your photos on the page as you’d like. Even though it can take a little more time, you can give your photo book an extra personal touch with some of our clip art, backgrounds, shapes, frames, and masks.
You can find all of these design options on the left-hand side of both the online and downloadable editors. Take a minute to quickly look at the options under the ‘background’ tab. Here you can choose background colour schemes from all sorts of categories, including travel and on-trend colours to make your photo book look even more unique. When you’re happy with the results, click ‘order’, if you’re using the downloadable editor, and ‘add to basket’ if you’re online.
Step 5: Preview and order your photo book (5 mins)
If you’ve been using the downloadable editor, you’ll be taken to the website where you can sign in or create an account and pay for your book. If you have a promotion code (from our newsletter, for example) you can add it during the checkout process.
At this stage, if you’ve got some extra time, why not upgrade your photo book and add some glossy pages, to make the colours pop in your images?
It’s as easy as that. And if you’ve got an hour to spare, why not start making your photo book now?