10.2. Phase 2: Publishing Options

10.1. Phase 1: Pick the Pix

The hardest part of the whole book-creation process is winnowing down your photos to the ones you want to include. Many a shutterbug eagerly sits down to create his very first published photo book ”and winds up with one that's 99 pages long (that is, $109).

In general, each page of your photo book can hold a maximum of six or seven pictures. (iPhoto also offers canned book designs called Catalog and Yearbook, which hold up to 32 tiny pictures per page in a grid. At this size , however, your pictures don't exactly sing. Instead, the whole thing more closely resembles, well, a catalog or yearbook.)

Even the six-per-page limit doesn't necessarily mean you'll get 120 photos into a 20 page book, however. The more pictures you add to a page, the smaller they have to be, and therefore the less impact they have. The best-looking books generally have varying numbers of pictures per page ”one, four, three, two, whatever. In general, the number of pictures you'll fit in a 20-page book may be much lower ”50, for example.

Either way, winnowing down your brilliant pictures to the most important few can be an excruciating experience, especially if you and a collaborator are trying to work together. ("You can't get rid of that one! It's adorable!" "But honey, we've already got 139 pictures in here!" "I don't care. I love that one.")

You can choose the photos for inclusion in the book using any selection method you like. You can select a random batch of them (page 109), or you can file them into an album as a starting point. You can even select a group of albums that you want included, all together, in one book.

If you opt to start from an album, take this opportunity to set up a preliminary photo sequence. Drag them around in the album to determine a rough order. You'll have plenty of opportunity to rearrange the pictures on each page later in the process, but the big slide-viewer-like screen of an album makes the process easier. Take special care to place the two most sensational or important photos first and last (for the cover and the last page of the book).