Family Heritage Photo Books - Tips For Creating Your Own Projects
Many of us have family photographs and heirlooms packed away in boxes or stored in out-of-the-way storage areas. It is a rewarding task-and much less complicated than you might think-to transform piles of photographs and memorabilia into beautiful family heritage photo books. The latest online photo book technology is extremely easy to use, even for the absolute beginner.
The beauty of this technique is that you can choose the level of complexity for your project. In its simplest form, a heritage photo book captures and preserves the photographs themselves, in a format that can easily be printed and shared with any number of family members. If you have a little more time to invest in the photo book project, you may want add text to the photo book, transforming a simple photo book into a digital scrapbook where memorable family stories can be narrated and important information written down and preserved. If you or another family member want to go even further, you might consider taking on the role of family historian, interviewing relatives and recording your discoveries alongside the images highlighted in the photo book itself.
Heritage photo books are also particularly suited to collaborative projects. If you decide to act as the organizer for a project, you will be the one organizing, collecting, sorting, scanning, and uploading the project. It will then be up to you whether you order the completed online photo books as gifts to give on a special occasion (the holidays, an anniversary, or family reunion, for example), or whether you send the link to the photo book you have created and leave the ordering up to your relatives.
The first step in a collaborative photo book project is to decide on the scope of the project you want to take on. Some ways of doing this include focusing on: one special person or couple ("Grandma Sophie's Life"); one side of the family tree ("The Watsons: The Story of Our Family"); or a specific time frame and what daily life was like then for your relatives ("The Watson Family Chronicles: 1915-1935").
After you have decided on the project details, you will want to search through the materials you already have available, and begin to sort them by theme, by family grouping, or by date. If your project is particularly large, you may want to label individual envelopes, folders, boxes, or clear sandwich bags so that your sorted photographs and memorabilia can be kept together. If you have a photo labeling pencil, you may want to write a short note on the back of each photograph, or number the photographs and then keep a journal or scrap paper nearby to record information about the images you want to use in the photo book.
Next, you can contact family members to see if they have images or stories they can add to your photo book project. Sending messages over email is convenient, since it allows your family members from far and wide to scan, upload, or attach digital photographs for you to use. Some may prefer to send you the original photographs. If this is the case, you can scan them yourself or bring a batch of photos to a local printing or graphic design store, where they can be scanned for you. Make sure to keep these organized so that they can be returned to the sender after the project is completed.
Another spin on the family heritage album is to put together a contemporary version; ask all of your relatives for recent family photographs, and add these to a heritage book or create a new photo book using the same photo-journalistic approach that you would take for an heirloom project.
