Photo Book Baby’s First Year in Review

Wow, I can’t believe a year and a half has gone by and we’re nearing Photo Book Baby’s second birthday. When we were at PBB’s first month checkup at the pediatrician’s office, a parent with an older child asked us how old our little guy was and told us, “I remember when our kid was just born. It goes by fast!” Fast indeed. Before I knew it, it was time to plan PPB’s first year in review photo book!

Even though it went fast, throughout the sleepless early months and beyond, I tried my best to capture all the fun memories armed with iPhone in hand. (That worked well until PBB discovered all the fun apps on mommy’s phone – and now I have to hide it!) I also made sure to get the DSLR out every month for PBB’s guitar photo and had professional photos taken at 3 months and at PBB’s first birthday.

Admittedly this book is just one of many books I plan to do on his first year. I’ve been actively keeping a journal of his milestones such as his first words, his favorite foods, etc. which I will make into a custom baby book (Not surprisingly, I just couldn’t find one off the shelf that I liked.) For this book, I wanted it to be visual record rather than one with a lot of captions. The captions I did use were done more artistically as you’ll see below.

I came up with a standard layout for the book, which will make your photo books not only look more cohesive, but it will also save you lots of time in laying out each page. In this way, you can easy duplicate the spread and then replace the photos with the next set.

Here was my plan:

• Pick my absolute favorite photos of PPB and separate them into monthly folders. I concentrated on photos of him solo versus photos with others to help narrow down the options, but there were a few family shots as well;
• Use fun and free word collage tool Tagxedo to create a graphic layout using verbs that describe PPB’s monthly progress;
• Highlight my absolute, absolute favorite photos by giving them a full page;
• Make a set of layouts to reuse for each month. For the most part, each month had a circular grid of 9 photos, a couple large full page photos and a graphic word layout. After creating these base layouts, I just repeated them for all 12 months. Easy!
• Notice my chalkboard layouts used again here? Here’s more on that and info on where to get my chalkboard freebies!
• So I could retain flexibility on where to print my book, I created these layouts in my own photo book software, Lumapix FotoFusion. More about FotoFusion here.

I love how this book turned out and so does PBB. (I’m afraid I’ve created a little narcissist!) Actually, PBB managed to make a game out of the book which was completely unintentional. For each layout, I included his monthly guitar photo in one of the grid of 9 circular photos. Once he noticed there was a guitar photo in each grid, he proceeded to “find the guitar” (like “Where’s Waldo”) and point to it on every page. He now calls this book the “guitar” book. What a little character!

I’d love to hear if you’ve done a similar book for your little one – and if you have any tips, please share in the comments! Happy photobooking!