Big life events and memorable travel experiences come with their fair share of wonderful pictures and rightfully deserve their own photobooks. But what about those everyday moments you treasure and want to remember? It’s probably not realistic to create a separate photobook for each weekend getaway, dinner party, home improvement project or dance recital, but one option that works well is to combine all of those events chronologically in a year-in-review photobook.
Year-in-review photobooks are just what they sound like: you compile your best pictures of a whole year in one book. If you keep doing them every year, with time, you will build a collection of photobooks that serve as your own time capsules, and show you what your life, your home and your family looked like at any point in time.
This is a fine goal, but how do you go about starting your first year-in-review book?
Calendar year or school year?
First of all, you need to define where your year will start and end, and there, you have 2 main options: a calendar year (January to December) and a school year (September to August).
Calendar years probably make the most sense for a majority of people: they are the simplest to define, you avoid any confusion about where to begin and where to end your selection, and you can clearly label and organize them in a neat way.
I would argue, however, that school years would probably work best for you if you have school-aged children. School years tend to form uniform blocks, because families are less likely to move in the middle of a school year, and more likely to organize their schedules around the natural rhythm created by school. So, if that is your season of life, I would advise you to start each photobook with the beginning of the school year, and end it with your summer vacation.
Should I work on my photobook throughout the year, or all in one go at the end?
The next logical question is: when should you work on your year-in-review photobook? Here again, you have 2 main options: doing little bits as you go through the year, or doing it all in one go, once the year is over.
You should of course find which method works best for you, but I personally find that doing the photobook at the end of the year is most effective. It will allow you to have a global view of the year, and more easily sort out the big events that stand out, and that you want to remember. It will also allow you to avoid the main trap of this sort of book: including too many pictures.
Quality over quantity
I have learned through experience that the photo selection step is the most important one, but this is especially relevant for year-in-review books, where the sheer volume of pictures can be overwhelming. So, before your start your selection, think about the year: which events stood out the most? Build the structure for your book without even looking at your pictures. I like to sit down with a pen and paper and list the main events that I want to feature: holidays, trips, big life events, etc. Then once you have that structure on paper, go to your pictures, and select the ones that best illustrate each event. This will help you immensely when you go through the process of actually making your photobook. But most of all, it will turn your photobook into a real story-teller, rather than a random compilation of pictures that any software could make for you.
Final tips
Finally, a few things I would suggest for a year-in-review photobook:
- Include pictures of your home, especially if you have moved to a new one. We rarely purposefully take pictures of the places where we live, and instead, tend to simply view them as the backdrop to our daily lives. But it can be really nice to have some pictures of your space included in your book, so that you can look back and remember it as you flip through your book years later.
- Include everyone’s pictures: once you’ve created the structure for your book, ask your family members and friends for the pictures that you may be missing. Better yet, create a Google photos album, where each person can upload their pictures, and make sure you save them in high resolution!
Year-in-review photobooks take time, but they are some of the most precious and meaningful books you can create. So I truly encourage you to invest the time and thought to make them, and hope that these few tips will make the process smoother and more enjoyable for you!