12 Photo Book Ideas to Celebrate Your Favourite Memories

Do you still print photos and make photo albums or scrapbooks? You should. We all have stories to tell, moments to look back to. It’s part of being human, and these photo book ideas will help us appreciate what we have more.

Curated with love and care, photo books can evoke feelings and emotions that are stronger than you could ever think of. They can be the perfect gift for your friends and family. It shows you’ve dedicated your time to collecting photos from special occasions and moments together.

Do we still need to print a picture or photo this day? Yes, we do. You know why? Unlock your phone and go to your gallery. You see the problem? You’ve got thousands of photos in there. Some are useless, just print screens or memes you received on WhatsApp. So, your most precious photos get lost in this amalgam of junk and then get dumped on a cloud and never looked at again. 

This is why it’s better to select your most precious photos, print them, and keep them closer to your heart. They matter the most.

So, how do you create a print photo book? You could start making a family photo book for each year, or a holiday special edition with all our travel pics? We’ve put together a list of cool photo book ideas that you’ll love more than you’d think.

12 Photo Book Ideas for Moments that Live Forever

In our lives, we go through different stages. Psychologists have identified 8 stages of life. We learn, laugh, cry, try, fail, succeed, and challenge ourselves through all these stages. We meet friends, start a family, adopt a pet, travel the world etc. 

Along the way, we find hobbies and things that we really enjoy doing and we do them. All these things are the themes of our lives. So, think about the things you love most in the world, and you’ve got your photo book ideas.

Let us give you some photo book topic suggestions, and we’ll build from there.

1. Year in Review photo book

This is probably one of the most popular photo book ideas out there. Don’t you love all those “Year in Review” posts you get from Facebook every December? How about you make your own?

December is usually a lazy month. Spend some time inside by the warm fire, and compile all the memory-worthy photos you have on your phone or laptop. Look back on all the year’s adventures, family outings, birthdays, holidays and everything else that sums up your year. Bring them all together in a beautiful year-in-review photo book.

No need to worry about the logistics of printing. We’ve got it covered!

2. Anniversary photo books

So, anniversaries come and go, but the memories stay and provide us with food for thought and reflection. How about you compile an anniversary photo book with all your birthday parties? You could also include important milestones, like graduation day or the day you’ve got your driving license.

Every year, you add a few more photos and look back on the ones already there. It’s a feeling that no other digital photo cloud can give you.

3. Your baby’s first year photo book ideas

A baby’s first year is a marvellous experience, filled with wonderful milestones that you might want to keep forever. So, you’ll want to keep track of all these discoveries. Compile each magical moment into a photo book that you will look back on anytime or even pass to your little bundle of joy when they grow up.

On the other hand, you could expand this idea to a photo book of firsts. Collect and document your child’s firsts from birth until they’re of age. Then you can pass this photo book to them to remember all their most important milestones in life.

4. “My favourite people” photo book

This photo book idea is simple. You don’t compile adventures, travel pictures, funny fails or parties. You gather all your favourite people together in one precious photo book.

Celebrate the people that matter the most to you. Fill this photo book with photos of your loved ones. We guarantee you’ll flip through those pages with recognition and gratitude for having them in your life.

5. Travel photo book

Google Photos has got nothing on you. If you love travelling and have been on some really fantastic trips so far, you should compile a travel photo book. Your Instagram feed just won’t cut it.

Moreover, you’ll love to look back on all those moments when planning your future journeys. A travel photo book shouldn’t be just about the places you’ve seen, but also about the stories. We’re sure all those photographs have a story. Tell it with a few words. You’ll see, it will be so much fun!

6. Family print photo books

So, you don’t want to build just another family photo book, right? How about you spice things up by adding old photos of your grandparents or ancestors? Draw a few genealogy charts and create a book that you can pass on to your descendants, and they can pass it to theirs. How cool would that be, right?

7. Photo book with bedtime stories

If your kids love bedtime stories, how about you create a storybook for them? Select some great photos from your travelling adventures and tell the story.

You could even invent a story using a few pictures from the beach or when you went to the Zoo. Incite your children’s imagination with stories anchored in their real lives. They’ll love them!

8. “All the Years of us Two”

If you don’t let it, romance doesn’t die out, folks. Print five photos of you two for every year of your relationship. Put them together in a naughty photo book that you’ll only keep to yourselves.

It will help put your past into perspective. Besides, who doesn’t like a chronological trip down memory lane, right?

9. Pets Photo Books Ideas

Don’t forget about your little furry friends. They also deserve your love and affection, and they hold a special place in our memories, as well.

If you have a family pet or pets, your phone is full of pictures of them. They make you smile every day, and you can’t help taking photos, right? We know it.

So, how about compiling a photo book just for your pet? Put together photos from every year, if possible. It would be lovely to look back on those years as a puppy or kitten.

10. Recipe Photo Books

If you love cooking, chances are your phone is brimming with pictures of all your most successful meals. How about you print all these photos and compile them in a recipe photo book? You can also write down the special recipe used and the memories from that meal.

It would be lovely to flip through the pages and re-make some of those recipes. After all, the kitchen is the heart of the home.

11. “Then and Now” Photo Book

Revisit the settings of some of your most precious photographs together and recreate them in the present. This is a great photo book idea for celebrating your marriage and relationship.

It will be fun, you’ll see. You will take a trip down memory lane quite literally.

12. Instagram moments

Wouldn’t it be great if you could recreate all your Instagram feed into a photo book? On Instagram, we post pretty much everything, from the most important moments of our lives to the silly everyday things that make us who we are.

Who knows, maybe in a few years’ time, you’ll give up on Instagram for some other cool platform. You wouldn’t want to lose all those precious Instas. They are who you are, what you’ve felt at specific moments of your life. Cherish and protect them.

Important tips

Once you’ve decided on a photo book theme, you’ve got to collect all those photos. Dust off the old hard disk drives or go fishing in your cloud. Make sure you save them all in a separate folder and delete all the duplicates.

You could use Lightroom for storing and organising your photos based on metadata and specific keywords. Moreover, you can perform various edits in Lightroom to make sure they are…well, picture-perfect.

So, after you’ve got all the photos, it’s time to create a little outline or storyline. Write down the chronological order of the pictures and decide how you want to mix them. Make a list of all the important places, times, and events that you need to showcase and choose only the pictures that present them the best.

Resist the urge to include too many very similar photos from a single event/day. You should try to spread them evenly.

Furthermore, you should ensure that all the photos are high-quality and suitable for print. Decide what size you want to print them and how that would go with the physical outline of the photo book. Make sure you leave space on the pages for a few words here and there. 

That’s it! Now, get going! Print all your favourite memories and compile them into great photo books.