How to create a vacation photo book or travel journal: Part 2

Organizing photos before you sit down to design your travel memory book will make life soooooo much easier!

Recently I shared Part One of this two-part blog about how to create a vacation photo book or travel journal, in which I shared tips for things you could do during your trip to make your memory-keeping project easier later. Here, in Part Two, I am sharing ways you can streamline your book creation after your trip.

Taking these steps will ensure that when you finally sit down to write and design your travel memory book, you’ll have everything you need conveniently at hand.

Do these things shortly after you return from your vacation to set you up for bookmaking success:

1. Consolidate all your photos in one place.

2. Select your favorite photos.

3. Photograph or scan souvenirs or other ephemera.

1 - Consolidate all your photos in one place.

Download all photos from smart phones and cameras and collect them in one digital space. I use a solid-state external hard drive that I back up regularly to the cloud for this purpose.

Here is a simple folder structure that works great for organizing vacation photos:

01 DAY 1 - Arrive in Rome
02 DAY 2 - Drive to Pienza + Easter dinner
03 DAY 3 - Winery tour + Tuscany exploration
04 DAY 4 - Vespas in Chianti
…etc.

The two-digit introductory numbers at the start of each folder name ensure that the folders will stay in the correct order. I do something similar when organizing photos for my annual photo books:

01 JAN 2023
02 FEB 2023
03 MAR 2023
…etc.

Then, within each of these folders, you can organize your photos into subfolders by theme or subject.

You may also want to create separate folders for images you download from each family member’s phone—that way you can quickly scan for duplicates and know who took each shot. (I recommend gathering these images from everyone’s phone shortly after you return from your vacation—while you may save all those pictures indefinitely, other family members may be more keen to free up digital space, and you don’t want to risk losing their pictures!)

Seem like a lot of work? Trust me, using a smart digital filing system to organize your photos in advance of making your book is way easier than trying to find photos amidst the thousand you took WHILE you are creating that book (a nightmare!!).

2 - Select your favorite photos.

For this one, I generally suggest waiting at least two or three weeks before reviewing your photos with an eye for curation. This emotional and temporal distance will give you a better perspective and allow you to more easily cut photos from your book and select the ones that best tell the story you’d like to tell.

How you mark favorites will depend upon how you store your photos. You may be starring your faves in software such as Google Photos or Lightroom. If you are physically moving your selected digital photos into a folder on your computer, I recommend creating a folder within each thematic folder called OUTTAKES and moving photos you are NOT using there. That way your photo organization system is still in place. And it’s way easier to eliminate photos as you go than to know immediately which images qualify as must-haves!

Don’t stress about this step. Focus on:

• choosing the best shot from the multiple you have taken of each part of your trip

• giving yourself options for later—who knows, you may want that horizontal shot to be enlarged across a whole spread…but then again, the vertical version may be just right as a section opener!

• finding a balance of personality-driven photos (your kids grimacing over a plate of vegetables at your preferred restaurant, say) with gorgeous scenery; of candid shots with stiff posed ones; of color with black-and-white

• choosing photos that make you smile and that trigger your memories.

3 - Photograph or scan ephemera or souvenirs.

All those ticket stubs, maps, and random notes that you collected on your travels? Now’s the time to go through them with an eye for what will look good on the page and add visual interest to your photo book. 

A ticket stub from a museum that has a Michelangelo sculpture printed on it is much more appealing than an unidentified stub with just text. A train ticket that shows your mileage traveled across Europe is far more compelling than one that simply lists a destination. A receipt that shows the ridiculously cheap price you paid a local villager in the Philippines for your sisal bag may be worthy of inclusion, but forget about most receipts in general.

I recommend scanning all of your paper souvenirs on a flatbed scanner (many home printers with a photocopying function can also scan nowadays, too). Set your parameters to scan full-color, 300dpi, at 100-percent size—this way, you’ll most likely avoid pesky moire patterns when scanning pre-printed materials, and when you place them in your design software, they will run at their actual size (if you create shadows beneath these images, the tickets or other ephemera will look like they are sitting atop your photo book pages, a very cool effect!).

If you don’t have access to a scanner, there are plenty of smart phone apps that can do the job of capturing these small items for print. Check out Google Photo Scan or Photomyne; these free apps enable you to use your phone’s camera to “scan” your souvenirs for use in your travel journal.

Yay! You’re ready to gather all those notes you took while on vacation (which we talked about in Part 1) and sit down to begin creating your travel book. Whether you choose to print photos to place in a good old photo album (my favorite smaller-size ones are from Project Memory, while great larger, archival photo albums are available from Kolo) or design and print a more full-fledged travel book (with written memories and reflections, of course!), you’ve now got everything you need to begin…and finish…your vacation memory book. Happy travels!!

If you prefer to hand over your keepsakes, photos, and travel journal to have a travel book professionally produced, please reach out to see how we could work together.