As the holidays were approaching, I dusted off the photo book generator I’d written last year and set out to create another photographic travelogue for our families in the US and France.

This time things were a little easier because I knew what I was doing. But I still had to filter through all the photos I’d taken in 2008, which numbered over 5,200. I pulled around 200 photos, emphasizing the trips we’d taken, and the shots with people. Eventually I culled them down to 105 images spread across 82 pages (7 pages longer than in 2007).

Since I wasn’t focused on the details of designing the book or writing the program to generate it, I was able to spend more time individually cropping and tweaking each photo. I also focused a lot on how each spread (the combination of every left and the right facing page) worked as a whole.

Once I’d stitched together a loose visual narrative, Stephanie and I set to writing the captions—in two languages. This was much easier said than done, and probably took the most time. In the end we’d written over 1,800 words.

Another challenge was coming up with a new cover. My creative juices were sapped after building the book, and I didn’t have any ideas that I thought could top the polaroid effect from 2007. Stephanie worried that if we did the polaroid thing two times in a row—we’d have to stick with it forever. We toyed with the idea of using a single image for the cover, but as soon as we added the year, it screamed calendar. So she started playing around with some other designs and eventually we came up with this multi-panoramic look. From top to bottom that’s Death Valley, Grand Canyon, Lassen, Joshua Tree, and Cinque Terre.

The week before Christmas we submitted the final 115 megabyte PDF off to Viovio and crossed our fingers hoping everything would come out ok (and on time). They all came out beautifully. Here’s a peek inside:

One thing that really struck me this year is how much fun it is looking back through last year’s photo book. I realized that the value of the book is not in the here and now, but later, after a few years have passed. All the time and energy we put into it over a few days in early December don’t just pay off at Christmas, but next year, and the year after that, and so on. At first we were motivated to start making these primarily as a way to connect with our grandparents, but now I can’t wait to show them to my grandchildren!

Update: my photo-book code is available on GitHub.