1st Year Photo Book
June 19, 2020

A few months ago I shared with you all that I was in the process of creating a photo book for Logan’s first year. This was a big accomplishment for me as I sadly admitted I have yet to complete our wedding album. I just knew that this is something I wanted to make as I have thousands of images on my phone, but want all our kids to have something tangible to look back on and share as I love looking through Matt and my albums from when we were growing up.

best photo books

This day and age everything is digital and while I know all these pictures will live on in the “cloud”, I wanted to make a photo book that captures so many special moments and memories. When I started sharing this process I had a bunch of DMs asking how I organized and set everything up to make it less overwhelming. I am compiling everything here today, including a break down of the two companies I use for creating photo books!

Artifact Uprising vs. Vistaprint:

Artifact Uprising

Artifact Uprising – While more expensive overall, this is hands down my first choice for quality and overall look. They have a bunch of photo book options, but I love their “everyday photo book” style the best. I have been using these to make albums from any trip/vacation we have gone on . You can see in the pictures I shot, this is the book I made from our time in Anguilla. You can choose 6 different fabric colors and either silver, gold or rose gold foil for embossing. Hands down my favorite feature is the embossing as you can write a title on the front and spine of the book to make it easy to identify and remember. You do not have this option with Vistaprint. The downside, you can only fit so many photos on each page, so when I wanted to capture Logan’s entire first year it was impossible because I wanted to maximize the images I included. I also used Artifact Uprising to make two baby board books for Logan!

Vistaprint – I have now made two books through them (as well as our Christmas cards) and honestly am happy with the quality and it was exactly what I was expecting when I was creating my book. Like I mentioned above, my biggest disappointment is not being able to engrave the cover, I am hoping I can take my books elsewhere and have this done so it is easy to see what each album references. You also only get two fabric color choices. Big plus is that (as you can see below) you can fit TONS of photos on each page!

Organizing everything:

Once you figure out where you want to create you album, the first things I did for making Logan’s is go into my photos on my phone. I then clicked sort by “months” and went through each month starting when he was born and selected photos to drop into a new album that I labeled “April 2019, May 2019, June 2019…. This way I had all the photos I wanted now separated by month as this is how I wanted to set up the book. I thought it would be fun to see his progression month after month. I then went back through and took out any that didn’t make the final cut.

Baby book

Next, I wanted to set up his album by month like I mentioned above. I started first with a photo on the day he was born for the beginning of April. Then afterwards I added all of the April photos I had over the next few pages…

vistaprint

Following this I used every “month photo” I took as the divider between months (as shown below). I tried to have it always be on the left side and the same format on each one of these pages. I then would switch up the layout of the smaller images depending on how many I had, etc.

vistaprint photo book
baby book

I hope you find this helpful! Also, I wanted to note that you can save your projects on both platforms so you don’t have to get everything done in one day. I gave myself a week to work on it a little bit each day. Let me know if you have any questions that I missed and have fun creating!

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