10 Steps to Making a Breathtaking Vacation Book
If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris…then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.
True to Hemingway’s words, my time spent in Paris has stayed with me. My most recent trip there was in 2021 when my father invited my sister and me on a tour through Europe. After nearly 54 years of marriage to our mom, he was ready to create some new memories since her passing in 2020. What better path to renewal than traveling to Paris and on to Zurich and Italy by way of the Swiss Alps?
Our 10-day vacation began with a historian-guided tour through the great monuments of Paris, punctuated by a ride on the Bernina Express with views of incredible alpine landscapes and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and ending with the ancient splendor of Rome. It was good medicine for us all and an incredible bonding experience. Upon return, we loved to reminisce about “Le Grand Tour.” With thousands of pictures saved in our phones, we knew that making a memory book of our trip was a must. All we needed was the time to do it—yet with full-time work and family responsibilities, time was in short supply.
We decided to use our dad’s 80th birthday as an excuse to get the project done. Once we committed to doing it, we had to act fast. Heirloom Digital has the capability to create beautiful private-edition books using a professional layout team, but hardcover travel books also can be done well with a good automated platform. For our project, Shutterfly proved to be the perfect DIY solution. With rapidly evolving technology, there’s never been a better time to learn how to use this robust tool, especially If you’re sitting on old memories that you want to preserve in a budget-conscious way.
Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither was our memory book, but my sister and I managed to complete it in six weeks and had fun doing it. –Amy Williams
Here are 10 tips to help you tackle your next memory-keeping project, whether for a trip you’ve already taken or in preparation for one you’re still planning:
- Start by getting your photos into a digital format. Creating a vacation book is a journey in itself, one that begins with your vacation pictures. If the vacation you’re preserving happened in the pre-digital era, your first step is to digitize those photos. Our partner Legacy Photo Lab with locations in Dallas and Fort Worth allows you to store your digitized files in our HeirloomBuilder platform, which is useful if you need a partner to help you. If you have the time and want to save money on your project, you can use a scanner at home. Either way, saving your converted files in folders on your hard drive backed up in the cloud is a good starting point for any preservation project.
- Store your vacation memories in a digital album. While folders on your computer are useful as a backup, they don’t offer a user-friendly viewing or sharing experience. That’s why you also need to select a dedicated photo storage platform. Choosing the right platform for long-term digital storage of your memories can feel like a difficult decision involving a comparison of software platforms and features. The choice becomes simpler when you look through the lens of your camera. As an iPhone user, I rely on the camera in my phone, which makes Apple’s Photos application the logical choice. Creating albums using the “Album” function allows me to save pictures from events in one place for easy access. (The iPhone also has a “Shared Album” function that enables multiple people to save pictures in a common album, but the smaller format of these images lowers their resolution, so those aren’t the pictures to use when making photo books). Suffice it to say that everyone has different preferences for how they take and store pictures. It’s worth taking time with this step to learn about the different aspects of photo storage to set yourself up for success in memory-keeping for the long haul.
- Touch up your photos. A number of platforms exist for editing your photos. In my experience, Apple Photos makes this step very simple. As with the above, your choice of tool will depend on the device you use to capture pictures.
- Curate, curate, curate. Curation—the selection, organization, and presentation of content—is central to ensuring the quality of your digital album, and ultimately your vacation book. Once you’ve created your digital collection of memories for a given vacation, select the best pictures of each experience to use for your book project. Download these curated images to your hard drive and save them in a folder where you can easily access them. (If this sounds like step one, the difference is these are curated, touched-up pictures that tell a story rather than every picture you took.)
- Create a digital travelogue. As an option before creating your book, consider creating an online travelogue out of your curated memories. It’s a great interim step for documenting the details of your travel experience with the benefit of shareability. Google Photos makes it easy to add text and visual elements such as maps to create a dynamic visual experience. Check out this link to see our vacation on this platform. Much of the text came directly from social media posts I created during the trip. (If you don’t tend to share experiences online, try jotting down notes about sites and experiences on your next vacation using the notepad on your phone. That way, you’ll have content ready to drop into a travelogue or book when the time comes.)
- Develop your vacation narrative. Not every vacation book needs a story around it, but books involving historical or cultural sites can benefit from captions for context. We ended up including so many pictures in our book that we chose to limit the written material to colorful quotes from writers who visited these sites and leave the details for our digital travelogue. For informal vacation books, I’ve seen clients include inside jokes from trips with friends and the humor makes it extra fun to look back on the memories. The key is to let the pictures tell the story and use textual elements to enliven it.
- Select a photo book platform. We used Shutterfly for our European vacation photo book. For Apple users, Motif (recently acquired by Mimeo Photos) integrates with the Apple Photos app and produces quality output. The selection of features is smaller than Shutterfly, but either platform enables you to create softcover or hardcover photo albums with a modern and chic design.
- Select a template and size. The format and size we selected for our project is a 10X10” square hardcover in keeping with other albums I have of the same size. The dimensions are purely a matter of personal preference. If you hope to turn your vacation book into a series, consider what size would work best based on where you hope to shelve or display your books.
- Take it one vacation day at a time. In our case, we visited three countries in 10 days and took more than 1,000 pictures. We organized the best photos from each day into separate folders to keep file management simple. We approached the book design with the same mindset of tackling one place or day at a time, which made digging back into the memories less overwhelming and more enjoyable.
- Remember that variety is the spice of your book’s life. Once you have considered or completed the steps above, you are ready to place the pictures on the pages of your book. Laying out your vacation story is like putting a puzzle together. Landscape or portrait? One powerful picture or six smaller ones? Shutterfly offers templates that are tailored to different types of books. Or, make your own layout with their huge selection of photo templates organized by the number of photos per page, with plenty of options to integrate text as desired. At this stage, you’ll discover just how much preparation pays off, and by this time you can rest assured knowing you’re working with the best pictures.
There’s no getting around it: In our exceedingly digital lives, pictures will continue to pile up. Preserving these memories takes time, mental space, and some expense, but it’s achievable and even enjoyable when you commit to a process. If you focus on preserving life events like vacations one by one, you will find that you’re able to steadily honor your best memories rather than drowning in all of them. And, with the AI-driven features of today’s DIY platforms, you have all the design support you need at your fingertips.
Whether you’re looking for coaching for your own project or prefer to immerse yourself in a full-scale book project including professional editing, layout and production, don’t hesitate to contact us. If you need help, reach out for a free family archives consultation. We’ve got this!
Need help? The Heirloom Digital team is pleased to offer you a free consultation on our personalized storytelling service. Get in touch today and let’s visit.
