iPhoto :: Preparing for a Book Order
Posted: June 30, 2006

Below is a sample series of photos that I have in my iPhoto library (from a recent camping trip):

My ultimate goal is to use a subset of these photos, and create a professional-looking book, using iPhoto's built-in book creation tool (click here for more information on doing this). Before I even start to create the book digitally, though, there are a few things I will want to do first to prepare for it.

Filter Your Photos
The first thing you will want to do is filter out all the photos you won't want to include. In the example of my camping trip, I took about 200 shots. Rather than using all 200, I will probably want to use about 60 or so. To filter these out, I will actually create a new album called "Camping Book", and put those 60 shots into there.

Organize Your Photos
Now that I have the 60 photos segregated from everything else, the other thing you want to do is organize them into the timeline you want. It's much easier to arrange the flow of photos in this layout than it is in a book format.

Edit Your Photos
To put your final touches on your photos before starting the book layout, you will want to do any last-minute editing. This could include removing red-eye, adding blur effects, desaturating, cropping, tilting, etc. It's much easier to do your image editing before you send them to your book format.

Now that you have filtered and organized your photos, it's time to create your book. Having done all of the above steps before creating the layout, you will find that the layout portion will go quite fast.