Back in April I published a post on using the Collect App to create a simple photo book.  I continued using the app for the rest of the year to take photos and document everyday moments.  I didn’t remember to take a photo everyday, but I did average about 20 photos per month.  Now that the year is over I need to finish this photo book started 8 months ago!

Thankfully, exporting all those photos from the phone to the computer was pretty easy.  The time consuming part was organizing them into the page template I had created and making sure the photos were in chronological order.  This sounds like a lot of work, but compared to the more detailed photo books I create, this was a piece of cake!

Once the photos were organized and the pages saved I started to think about a cover design.  Since this is a simple photo book without a lot of extras, I wanted to keep the cover simple too. I decided to use the Collect App card design to highlight the title.

Every photo book I make has an introductory page.  I don’t like opening up a book and diving right into the pages, but rather prefer to have a nice overall impression of the book on the first page.  This intro page captures one of my favourite photos from the year as well as a subtitle that offers a bit more information about the pages to follow.

The rest of the pages in the book follow a template of 4 photos per row with 3 rows per page.  The beginning of each month is also highlighted with a black and white card designed to compliment the modern, minimalist design of the photo cards.

If you have recently read the other post I wrote last year about the Collect App (read it here), you may notice that I have changed the book design slightly.  Instead of using filler cards to represent days of missed photos I decided to eliminate them altogether.  If I used the filler cards, I would have ended up with a 28 page book.  Removing them decreases the page count to 20 and, since the cost of printing photo books depends on the number of pages, I saved myself a bit of money.

Once the pages were all complete, I uploaded them to my favourite photo book printing company, Adoramapix.  Originally I was going to print this as an 8″ x 8″ book, but since the photos and text are pretty small I went with the next size up, 10″ x 10″.  And as I mentioned earlier, I like to save money so I won’t print this right away, but rather wait for a 40% off sale.

Do you use the Collect App?  If so, do you keep the photos on your phone or do you print them off?  If not, give the app a try – you will have a great collection of memories captured for the year.

Leah