From the Manual

• Start at the beginning of your files.
• Your travel album should be a chronological account of the traveling that took place.
• Consider how many photos are you working with in a group.
• If the event is not important, be flexible with removing more images.
• If the event is important, try and use all the photos.
• Consider if any of the photos are spectacular.
• Plan to look for templates that will feature the spectacular photos.
• Consider if there is any journaling about this event.
• If there is, choose a template that has a designated place for journaling.
• Consider if there are any paper memories for the event.
• Will you include them on the layout or save them till the end? 

From the Transcript

When creating a photo book through the use of templates, a lot of unnecessary time can be spent deciding which template to use. In this video, I’ll help to simplify the process for you with a few tips and questions.

My first tip is to start at the beginning. Your travel album should be a chronological account of the traveling that took place, and it will be easier to put that album together if you just do things in the order that they happened.

Earlier in this class, we named all the files in our travel folder so that they would be grouped by date and event. So, take a look at a group of photos from one single event, then consider a couple of questions. 

First, how many photos are you working with? I have fifteen in this single event. I’ve already weened out close duplicates and unusable photos, but moving forward I’m going to keep in mind that I can always leave more out if needed. I’m also going to keep in mind that this particular event was not a huge highlight of the trip. If the event were super important, I’d want to try and include every memory.

Then next question I’ll want to consider is IF any of the photos are spectacular and needing to be especially highlighted? I thought these three photos were pretty spectacular, so I might want to make them much larger than the others. Some set of photos you will encounter will not have any spectacular ones and others will tons. It just depends on the event.

Next I’m going to question whether there is any journaling about the event. Because if there is, it will be easier for me if I choose a template that already contains a journaling space. How about paper memories? Do you want to include any paper memories with the photo group you’ve chosen? I personally included all of the paper memories at the very end of the book in order to keep things more unified.

With those thoughts in mind, take a browse through the templates. Which would be a good fit? Don’t worry, there is no right answer. Working with digital is all about being adaptive, so that’s exactly what we are going to be.

I’m going to go with these two templates, and here’s why. I had fifteen photos to place into templates. I had to have two templates at the very minimum just to make a good effort of including most of the photos. But since this event was not among the top reasons they vacationed here in the first place, it would probably be okay if I cut some of the photos out to save space and money. Also, I really wanted to highlight three of the spectacular photos they took. There are three really nice large clipping masks on these two templates. A bonus of choosing these two templates was there were two journaling spots for them to write their thoughts of when and why they visited this place, and what they thought of it. So, here are those same two templates with the photos placed in them. Again, if this particular event was a very big deal, I would have simply filled up another template with the remaining photos. But these two pages adequately capture the event and highlight a few spectacular photos.

So, hopefully that will help you when trying to decide which templates to pair with which group of photos.