Making a Photo Book
Psst, scroll to the end of this post for a Papier discount code worth £10 off your first order. They do a lot of cool things, beyond their photo book offering, like personalised cards and notebooks. You’re welcome!
My mom had been asking for years that I make her a photo book of some of my own photos. And I finally got around to doing it last year for her birthday. It was the perfect time to finally put one of these together and I’m very pleased with the result.
Choosing a Supplier
To find a supplier that could print my photo book, I did an old-fashioned Google and compared the results. I mostly looked at sites that I had heard of. I ended up settling on Papier. I was familiar with their brand from their Instagram account. I liked the look of the product. And they had the added bonus of 40% off all photo books. This made it extremely affordable by comparison to other sites. Especially as I knew I’d likely want to add extra pages on top of the base price.
Creating the Photo Book
I went for one of the “minimalist” styles in the landscape format. I knew my mom wanted to use the book as a coffee table book, so I wanted something that would be a decent size and the landscape format just seemed to be the type of book you would flip through with someone else while sat together on the sofa.
Assembling the book itself wasn’t too difficult. I went through old hard drives and picked out various photos, making sure to find originals so I could get the highest resolution possible. Then I edited them in Lightroom to make sure that all my edits were consistent.
The web-based builder for the book was OK. It wasn’t the easiest to use, but I’ve definitely had worse. I had to do it twice because I exported my photos a bit too small the first time. It also annoyed me by saying my photos weren’t high enough quality, even though I’d exported them at massive sizes. For the cover photo, in particular, I exported it at a very high quality, but then the building tool told me the file size was too large. So I’d make it smaller, and then it would say the photo was not high enough quality. It was infuriating!
The paper texture I chose was matte paper. Now I really like the look of matte paper from an aesthetic point of view! I like that it doesn’t get fingerprinted and I like the more vintage feeling. But gloss paper will make the colours pop a lot brighter, which might be the favoured approach when printing photos. And, as my partner pointed out, while it doesn’t get fingerprinted, it makes it easier for stuff to get on the page and not be able to be wiped away.
I think if I could add another feature it would be the option for captions. While I think most of the collections I made are self-explanatory, I think a little note with the location and year would be beneficial. I think they mostly market to events like weddings, which are on one date and in one place, so I can see why they may not have that feature.
Overall, I would recommend Papier for printing photo books, and, in all likeliness, I will use them again at some point.
Looking for a Papier discount code?
If you’re new to Papier, you can get £10 off your first order. (Full disclosure: I will also be given £10 credit toward Papier products after you make your purchase.)
