Creating family photo albums is important for many reasons. Besides being a fun project that brings children, parents, grandparents and other relatives closer together, your selection of favourite photos tells the story of your family, and preserves your legacy for future generations.
Being able to leisurely browse images that were captured years ago can trigger long-buried memories and evoke sentimental feelings of nostalgia. If you love the idea of sharing special moments with your nearest and dearest, for many years to come, there’s no time like the present to start creating a family photo book that showcases stunning snaps of some of the happiest experiences of your life.
Organise your photos
To leave behind a lasting legacy for future generations to explore and enjoy, it’s crucial that you preserve your favourite photographs today. While modern day digital photographs may be quick and easy to snap, there’s absolutely no guarantee of their permanence. Unless you save the images correctly, you could lose your favourite snaps forever.
To organise and preserve your visual assets like a pro, it’s a good idea to learn how to archive your photos. Archiving your favourite photographs preserves your family’s history, and teaches future generations about what life was like back in the day.
Begin by sorting through vintage black and white photos and retro Polaroids, and picking out favourite snaps to feature in your keepsake photo albums. Old images that have become faded over time can be freshened up via a colourising app that makes them look like new. Snapping your vintage photographs with your smartphone will instantly digitise them for backup purposes.
Once you’ve organised your physical photographs, check your mobile device and print your favourite from the vast collection of stored images. Remember to always use an external hard drive to save photos, and back them up on the cloud.
If you’re active on social media, don’t forget to check your personal accounts. You’ll be surprised at how many great photos and details can quickly gather online. Pick the best of the best Insta images to include in an album of photographs that’s curated to stand the test of time.
Choose the perfect photo album
The perfect album for preserving your most precious keepsake photographs for generations is of the highest quality, but also comfortably within your budget. A beautiful, elegant and luxurious investment photo album can be softcover hardcover or covered in tactile fabric, and include as many finest quality smooth, matte or textured paper pages as you want.
As the cover of your photo album sets the mood and tone for the content, it’s recommended that you choose the most spectacular photo to showcase on the front. It’s also worth reserving equally special favourite snaps for the first and last pages of your lasting legacy family photo book.
If you can’t decide on a cover image, you can always embellish the photograph album with the family name typography, or a fancy heraldic crest.
Create stunning displays
When you’re creating family photo albums, you have a number of creative display options available.
You can pick your favourite photos in groups, like birthdays, holidays, milestone events and everyday stuff, or you can create a themed photo book for each member of your family. The latter option allows you to show, tell and share individual life stories.
As you’ve now sorted your visual assets, it will be much easier to arrange the best images in a chronological order that tells a story, ready for display in personalised photo albums.
Chronologically ordered imagery is easiest to follow if you recreate a natural sequence of how an event occurred, via your favourite snaps. When viewing the collection of images, the browser should be drawn to look at each photo from top left to right, all the way down to the bottom.
Selecting a curated layout template allows you to easily customise the design of your photo albums. Using different layouts for themed pages can emphasise your favourite family photos in unique ways. You can highlight a stunning portrait photo on a full page, or artistically arrange multiple snaps of the same size on a single page. Panoramic images, group shots and photographs that relate to each other look amazing when displayed on double page spreads.
Do be careful not to overcrowd the pages with too many photos. Less really is more, if you want to create a positive lasting impression on generational browsers.
Finish off with descriptive text
To bring the images in your forever family photo album to life, simply add descriptive text.
You can use descriptive headings to highlight sections or pages of the photo album that are themed. Or to sum up a collection of images, like ‘home life’, ‘what we did on our holidays’, ‘a year review’ and so on…
If you’ve chosen to tell a story, by arranging your favourite photos in chronological order, adding a comment or caption to each image on display will be greatly beneficial to the future viewer of your album. Browsing a legacy collection of photographers is much more enjoyable, when you have access to all of the who, what, when, where, why and how details.
Being able to easily identify each person featured in your family photo albums can encourage future generations of your clan to take an interest in genealogy, and to preserve precious visual memories for many years to come.
