Video 05-04-01: Advanced Family History Books—Introduction and Downloads

When you’re ready to create a book that’s a little more advanced than one-photo-per-page, you have some good options. I’ll discuss three of them in this video so you can choose the one that sounds the most doable for your level of expertise.

Video 05-04-01: Advanced Family History Books—Introduction (7:10)

If you want to create a book that’s a bit more advanced than one photo per page you have several good options including using an online design program like Canva.com.

I didn’t list Adobe Spark here because you’ll get an Adobe Spark logo on every page of your book unless you have an Adobe subscription, and if you do have an Adobe subscription you probably already know how to use Photoshop and therefore don’t need a program like Adobe Spark to create book pages, so for advanced books I’ve chosen to only feature Canva.

Another option is to use an online photo book company, or you can create your book pages in a photo editing program like Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.

Let’s take a quick look at each of these options in reverse order starting with a photo editing program like Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.

Photo Editing Software

I personally make most of my books using Photoshop. In fact, this is a book about my Mom from birth through high school. You can get really fancy when you make a page using Photoshop. You can use blend modes and custom shadows. You can design your own pages and add elements that complement your page.

But all this fanciness comes at a price, even for people like me who are very comfortable using Photoshop. It takes a lot more time to design something fancy. Don’t get me wrong. I love using Photoshop and it has one really big advantage:

You can use it to edit or fix problem photos, and a lot of heritage photos could use some fixing up, so if you have the time and inclination to learn it, check out my two classes called QwikLearn Photoshop or QwikLearn Photoshop Elements. But let’s get back to creating photo books.

I now have a new motto when it comes to creating my more advanced family history books:

DONE IS BETTER THAN
FANCY DESIGN

Check out this book called Alaska Adventure that I made for my son. The design is simple and yet it’s just as beautiful and meaningful as a heavily designed book or a book that’s highly ornamented. It’s certainly more focused on the photos and journaling.

Don’t let the simple design fool you. This is still an advanced book. An advanced photo book:

  • Usually has more photos
  • Often includes journaling for a longer story
  • Is often divided into sections based on time or topic so it feels more cohesive and organized
  • And it’s usually longer—60+ pages is not unusual

All this can be accomplished with or without Photoshop, so let’s go to our second option…

Online Companies That Print Photo Books.

The three I use are Shutterfly, Adoramapix, and PrestoPhoto, but there are other photo printing companies that are equally excellent. These companies have drag and drop pre-designed pages that make it easy for you to create and print a photo book.

On some sites, like Shutterfly, which I’m showing here, you can choose a service called Make My Book where someone puts your book together for you but you have the final say and can edit it after they’re done. Or you have a couple other options all the way from a little bit of automation to doing everything yourself and making all the decisions about how you want your book to look.

These companies offer you a selection of the most popular book sizes. They also provide design templates for different themes. After you choose a template you’re given the opportunity to check out what some of the pages look like and when you’re ready you can upload your JPEG photos.

Over on the left you can choose a layout based on the number of photos you have. Each company will be slightly different so I’m not going to actually walk you through creating a book, but you should find it pretty intuitive, and if you have a question you can search the FAQs on the company website or contact customer support.

Just to be clear, if you create a book using Photoshop or Canva, you’ll need to save each individual page as a jpeg and upload it to a photo book printing site to turn the pages into an actual book you can hold in your hands and share with others.

Choose a book template that makes it easy to fill each page with one photo—such as the Digiscrap book on Shutterfly found at the very bottom of the Everyday category. Or search for the name “Digiscrap.”

The Digiscrap book looks like this with every page showing the option for one photo per page. The process of putting your book together will be very similar to creating a book with just photos, the only difference being that you’ve already designed your entire page before you upload it as you see here with my photo thumbnails.

So an online Photo Book Printing Company has a big part to play. You can create your entire book using their templates and then print it or you can choose to create your pages elsewhere and upload them to a photo book printing company to create the final book.

Canva

The last option I want to discuss is Canva. Canva.com allows you to design a page with multiple photos, backgrounds, and type. This is the page I’ll show you how to create in the videos for how to use Canva.

Here’s a closer look at the textured paper I used for the background.

You can even use png elements, like this flourish. Elements are like stickers that you use to decorate your page. Most elements, though, need a drop shadow, and Canva doesn’t have a drop shadow option. Elements that don’t need a drop shadow, like this flourish element work well on Canva.

In the Canva training videos I’ll show you a drop shadow workaround but it works best with photos like these or with elements that only need a very small drop shadow.

Once you create the pages you can download each one as a JPEG and then upload the JPEGs to an online photo book company to create the actual book, as we discussed earlier, but Canva also allows you to create a multi-page PDF.

I did create these pages in Photoshop because I’m so accustomed to doing that but this wedding book could have easily been created in Canva. I upload the pages to Canva to create the PDF.

Currently Canva allows a maximum of 30 pages per PDF, so since I had 60 pages I simply created 2 PDFs, Part 1 and Part 2.

So there you have three great options for creating more advanced books and two of them, photo book printing company and Canva.com, are easy enough that even if you’re just getting started you can create a stellar book to enjoy yourself and to share with future generations!

If you want to learn the basics of how to use Canva to create a multi-page book, watch the following videos in this section!

Complete and Continue