How to Add Text to your Photo Book Plus How to Use Your Own Fonts

For any interested readers, I will be starting a series of posts of how to make your own photo book from start to finish. I’ll be getting into more detail and going step-by-step. Feel free to let me know if you have any topics you specifically want me to cover and I’ll be sure to add that in the series.

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Hi all, I’ve been getting a lot of good questions from readers and fans, and I want to start sharing some with you.  This question came from “JB” in June 2010 and it’s a good one about adding significant amounts of text to your book.  We had a couple additional e-mails after this, but this covers the main parts of our e-mail discussion.

(JB, I hope you were able to finish your book) 🙂

QUESTION:

I want to be able to add text from a word document or chart from Excel.  Can you tell me which of the companies you compare have that capability–I am doing a memorial for my mother and have photos, recipes and want to have a few pages of words.

Thanks JB

ANSWER:

Hi J,

I would say that most if not all of the photobook companies would have that capability.  You should be able to go into your Word doc or Excel then do a copy paste into the text box of your photo book layout.  I would just make sure to carefully double check the preview to make sure that the text does not get translated into any weird characters that shouldn’t be there.

Spell check would be important too.

The biggest issue I have though with adding text is that some of the font selections can be pretty limited.  In the past, when I’ve wanted a particular font, I’ve laid out the text in a separate program like Photoshop and by doing so got to control 100% the font I was using and exactly how it was going to lay out, including whether I wanted a photograph to be the background to the text.

Here’s the basic steps:

1. Create your layout using text and photos in the photo editing/layout program.
2. Save it as a JPEG and import it into the book making software like any other photo.
3. Select a full bleed single photo layout.
4. Then drag and drop it in.

It’s worked great when I’ve done it and the text prints out just the way I want it.

You can also use this method to make custom layouts for any book maker that doesn’t have fully customizable layouts within their software.  (Our Photo Book Software Wizard can sort out the companies that have this feature.)

No worries – if you don’t have Photoshop:

1. You can download a free trial of Photoshop at the Adobe website;
2. Try one of the other FREE photo editing programs online:

http://www.picnik.com

http://fotoflexer.com/

http://www.pixlr.com/

I haven’t used these other programs extensively, but I believe they all would have a similar process as noted above.

Sounds like a great project that you’re doing.

I am planning to post some Q&A on my blog – so hope you don’t mind if I post this Q&A there since it’s a good question.  (I don’t put any name or email or other identifiable info on the Q&A)

I would like to put first name and last initial if you don’t mind, but otherwise, I can just post it anonymously.

Let me know if this helped!

PhotoBookGirl

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FOLLOW UP:

Dear PhotoBook Girl,

You most certainly can use my question.  And your answer is very thorough.  I am an extreme novice at this and I have been using your site as my “tutorial”.  Since I am such a novice, your answer is a bit Greek to me, but I am going to work through it. I think a Q&A would be great on an already outstanding website. Of course you can use my question just as you suggest. Thanks again, I may be back with other questions in the near future.

J

*******UPDATE*******


I wanted to elaborate a little further the first part of the question about adding text to your photo book, as I went on a bit of a tangent. In order to make this Q&A more readable, I didn’t include the additional e-mail exchanges I had with JB which got a little more specific to her particular situation.

Note that Microsoft Word and other similar programs tend to add other information that is not visible when you do a cut and paste.  Even when doing this blog, if I write it in Word and then cut and paste into WordPress sometimes I get weird formatting or odd characters that you can’t remove unless you go into HTML.

If you have considerable amounts of text that you want to add to your photo book, this is what I would recommend:

1. Open up your Word document or any program in which you have your narrative saved;
2. Select and copy all of the text you wish to add;
3. Open up Notepad (PC) or TextEdit (Mac) (Both FREE programs that should already on your computers. Notepad is under your Programs under “Accessories”);
4. Paste the copied text into the program;
5. In Notepad, once you paste, it converts it to plain text;
6. In TextEdit – go to “Format” select “Make Plain Text”;
7. Now you can safely copy and paste this unformatted text into your photo book caption box;
8. Make sure to run spell check if available in the photo book software program and ask someone to proofread it for you;
9. Always double-check your book using the “Preview” function