Making Photo Books: Planning Your Approach, Part II

In Part I of “Making Photo Books: Planning Your Approach,” I started at the beginning, which is making the decision about what type and style of book you’re going to make. Those are often somewhat easy decisions. Now you get to start on what I consider to be the good part, which is actually organizing the content of your book. When I make an Inkubook, I first…

2. Make an Outline

The outline for my cookbook.

Whoa, take it easy. I can sense that your eyes just widened in horror. There’s no need to panic. I’m not talking about the kind of outline your eighth-grade teacher made you do for your paper about genetic traits in fruit flies. I’m talking about a simple breakdown of the order of your book. For example, I’m working on a cookbook so that I have the recipes I use frequently in one location. I’m tired of searching through a pile of loose papers every time I want to make some delicious French toast. So I’ve made an outline of how I want to organize the content of the cookbook. There’s a photo of my outline in this post.

Before you dismiss this idea as totally over-the-top, über-organized planning, give it a little consideration. It’s easy to rearrange and add pages to your Inkubook, but it’s even easier to erase and rearrange with your pencil or in a word-processing document. A small amount of up-front planning can help you have a better book in the end. And if you happen to have some nostalgic feelings about those eighth-grade papers, The OWL at Purdue has an excellent resource on developing outlines.

With the outline out of the way, I’m ready to…

3. Sort Through and Separate Photos

Because I know what my book is about and the rough order the content will be in, I also have some idea of what photos will be in it. So I take a little time to find them and put them all in one folder. You see, my husband takes care of most of the photo management in our house, and he’s every bit as organized as I am. (We’re truly a match made in heaven.) His system of filing photo files is so elaborate that it can sometimes take me quite some time to figure out what’s where. By giving some thought to what pictures I need, I can find them and copy them all to one Inkubook folder so that I need to browse to only one place when I upload my photos, which makes that step incredibly quick and easy.

Doing this preparation doesn’t mean that in the middle of making a book I don’t sometimes think, “Oh, crikey! I forgot that picture of the dog in the life vest,” but it does minimize the amount of time I have to spend searching for photos when I’m in the midst of the excitment of making the book. Collecting the photos ahead of time keeps me from losing my groove, if you know what I’m saying.

In Part III of “Making Photo Books: Planning Your Approach,” I’ll suggest a couple more tips for collecting and organizing your photos. In the meantime, leave a comment to tell me if you have any special tricks for organizing your photo books.

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