How to plan a family project

"My mother and father recently took our entire family (15 of us) on a trip to Jamaica. My siblings and I were talking about combining all of our photos and making one big photo album for our parents as a thank you to them. It then occurred to me how great it would be to have one of your storybooks made (and possibly copies for all of us). Do you have any suggestions on how I can go about this? We would have 5 digital cameras to pick and choose photos from." - Chris from Baraboo

This is a common question that includes weddings, family reunions, and memorable trips such as yours. The very first thing you should do is organize your photos. Download them from your cameras into folders on your computer. Discard the duplicates and make any corrections with your software, such as correcting red-eye. Heritage Makers allows cropping so don't worry about doing that until you start putting them onto your pages.

Get together as a family and decide the vision for the book - is it going to be arranged by date or by event, or by the combination of both. For instance, when Martin and I sang for the Classical Music Festival in Austria, we visited Vienna three times. I didn't want to have three separate sections of Vienna, so I combined the photos and notes from those events and put them in one section of our book. By having a clear vision, you can organize your photos ahead of time, making it much easier to manage when you begin uploading them to your photo albums on the HM website.

Give a title to your photo folders that make sense and upload them onto the Heritage Makers website in the same order you've arranged your book. For instance, for our Austrian trip, I titled the first batch of photos "And we're off" and I wanted it in the first section of the book, so I added "A1" to it, both in my computer folder and when I created the photo album on the website, "A1 - And we're off." After I had an "A9", the next one was "B1", since the computer automatically references them in alpha-numeric order.

As for choosing the type of book, for trips and events, I suggest the 11.5x8.5 book. If you want to make it a special, coffeetable book, I suggest the 13x11 Legacy Edition that has a leather cover and full-color jacket. And if you have an idea of how many books you're going to order, I suggest taking advantage of the quantity specials. When I made my family's genealogy book, I knew I was going to make at least 6 copies, so I took advantage of a special that was running at the time and saved a lot of money. Remember, when you pre-purchase any of the specials, you get one year to complete your project.

Also, something to remember, since Heritage Makers is web-based and you don't have to download any software onto your computer, everyone in your family can work on the same project, even if you're thousands of miles apart. You share an account number and password and that's where your project and photos albums are stored and managed.

So, in short:
A. Start with organization of your photos to coincide with your vision of the book.
B. If you know you're going to make multiple copies, contact me to see if there's a special offer you can take advantage of.
C. Get input from everyone (and I would be happy to email detailed instructions to everyone).
D. Contact me if you have any questions.

Blessings,
Carolyn
http://www.astorytohold.com/