Old photos are fragile in more ways than one. The paper fades, the colours shift and the people who knew who was in them grow fewer every year. Getting them scanned and labelled is a job worth doing now.
Good to know: every Paperleaf book has room for thirty photos, so there is no prize for keeping more.
My mum reads the captions more than she looks at the pictures.
Leila, who writes every caption by hand
Keep it simple
Do not aim for perfection. A good-enough scan with the right caption beats a perfect scan of a stranger.
Start with the photos that only one person can still name. Everything else can wait.
- Write a few words beside the best ones
- Pick a fixed day each month
- Include at least one place, not just faces
What to look for
Share the book when it arrives. Leaving it on the kitchen table for a day is often enough for everyone to have a look.
If you have too many photos of one day, that day probably mattered. Give it a spread of its own rather than cutting it down to one.
My mum reads the captions more than she looks at the pictures.
Leila, who writes every caption by hand
A few small rules
Do not be afraid of imperfect photos. A little blur or a stray elbow often tells you more about the day than a tidy, posed shot.
Most people find the first month the hardest. You are learning what you like, and every photo feels important. By the third month you will notice yourself moving faster, trusting your first reaction and spending your time on the handful of close calls instead of on every single picture.
Good to know: every Paperleaf book has room for thirty photos, so there is no prize for keeping more.
Start with what you already have
Keep the rejected photos somewhere safe for a while. Tastes change, and a picture you passed over may be the one you want next year.
Try not to edit every photo. A little brightening is fine, but heavy filters date quickly and make a year of books look uneven when they sit together on a shelf. Let the light of the day show.
- Leave the cover for last
- Include at least one place, not just faces
- Keep one photo per day at most
Make it a habit
Take one photo before the moment and one after. The before and after often say more than the moment itself.
When a month has a big event in it, such as a wedding or a first day at school, let it take over. There is no rule that says every week needs equal space. The book should feel like the month felt.
Picking is a skill. Like any skill, it gets faster.
Priya Nair, Paperleaf print room
Try it this month
It helps to know what the book is for before you start. A book for grandparents wants faces and clear captions. A book for yourself can hold the odd corner of the garden, the shadow on the wall and the plate of food that only makes sense to you.
Keep the phone charged and the lens clean on days you expect to matter. It sounds small, but a flat battery or a smudged lens has cost more good pictures than any missing piece of equipment.
Quick tip: star photos on your phone as you take them. Picking takes half the time at the end of the month.
When to stop
Faces matter, but so do places. Include at least one picture of the room, the street or the view where the month happened.
Quiet months are worth printing too. A month with no trips and no birthdays often turns into the book people return to, because it shows what ordinary life looked like before it changed.
- Hand the camera to someone else
- Pick a fixed day each month
- Write a few words beside the best ones
Why it works
On the second pass, look for variety. A month of the same room and the same faces feels flat, even if each photo is lovely on its own.
Keep a note of what happened that month as you go. A few words beside a photo are worth far more than you expect a year later.
The book comes, and for one evening nobody looks at their phone.
Marcus, father of three
What we got wrong
Leave a little space. Not every page needs to be full, and an empty corner gives the eye somewhere to rest.
Think about how the photos sit next to each other. Two busy pictures side by side can fight; a busy one beside a quiet one usually works.
Reader tip: one family keeps a paper list on the fridge of moments they want in the next book.
One more thing
Write the year on the spine. It sounds obvious, but without it a shelf of books quickly becomes a puzzle.
If two photos are nearly the same, keep the one where someone is doing something. A raised hand, a turned head or a half-finished sentence gives a picture life that a perfectly still pose rarely has, even when the still one is technically better.
- Back up before deleting anything
- Write a few words beside the best ones
- Leave the cover for last
Keep it simple
Some readers keep a short list of rules on a sticky note beside the computer. Ours says: faces first, then places, then anything that made us laugh. It is not scientific, but it stops the session turning into an evening of second-guessing.
We tried the one-photo-per-day rule last month and it made picking so much easier. Thank you!
Such a simple idea and I had never tried it. Doing it tonight.
Thank you, that really made our day.
Ha, the box in our loft is full of strangers as well.
My grandmother cried when she got the book. That is all I wanted to say.
Lovely post. The bit about keeping the blurry photos made me go back and rescue a few.