Group photo books make for a fun and interesting project that everyone can contribute to. Here are some ideas to help get you started.

Planning Ahead:

Whether your photo book project is based on a sports team, a vacation or a special event, you should do what you can to get everyone involved as early in the process as possible. Send out a group email at the start of the season, or before the trip, letting them know what the project is going to be about and how they can help. Make sure that everyone feels as if they are included by sending or handing out small notebooks that your group can carry around to write down the amusing or important things that happen over the course of the event. If not everyone has a digital camera, you can either loan one of your old ones out, or let them use an old film camera and when they get the film developed, tell them to have the processor create a CD with the photos on it. Unfortunately, this will give you photos with lower resolution, but at least everyone who wants to will have contributed.

The great thing about photo books is that they can use both words and pictures to keep the memories alive and to provide context for everyone who looks at the book forever.

Photos and Words:

Digital photography has changed everything. No longer do you have to worry about wasting film, or waiting for it to be developed just to see if you have anything worth saving, only to find out that there was something wrong with the film and the whole roll is shot.

Other than the ability to easily edit, arrange, and print your own photos, this new age of photography comes with one aspect of freedom that statistically increases the quality of the photos that the average person is able to create: you can take hundreds of photos, and choose the best one. So snap away, and encourage all of your contributors to do the same.

When you hand out your notebooks, you will find that you will get varying degrees of participation. Don’t worry about it, some people are natural writers and some aren’t. Just be grateful for the words that you get and encourage everyone to contribute at least a little bit, if even in the form of a short bio.

Arranging and Designing:

There are more than a few online services that enable you to allow your whole group to upload photos and words at will, but you might want to have a little more control over your project than this type of open system provides. If that is the case, simply ask for the contributions via email, or give your group a link to your FTP site where they can upload the photos and you can start to do any necessary editing and arranging.

Binding:

Again, there are online services that will take care of this for you. But if you are making a lot of books, you might be better off simply purchasing a thermal binding machine and doing the work yourself. These machines are what the big boys use, and are very easy to use and inexpensive as well.

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Category: Arts and Crafts
Keywords: group photo book,group photo,photo book,group photo books,photo books