Choosing the best photos for a photo book is the first step toward creating a unique, memorable, and visually appealing memory book. We’ve pulled together top tips for selecting photos for a photo book so you can make the most of your time and embrace your creative side.

Who Is Your Photo Book For?

Before you start putting your photo book together, consider the book’s purpose, theme, and who you might want to gift it to. If this is a personal memory book of photos, you might include photos you wouldn’t necessarily show to anyone else—bad hair days, anyone? If your photo book is going to be a gift, you need to choose photos you’re happy for the recipients and possibly any of their friends or family to see. Remember, people take photo books out to show them off again, so you might not be able to control who sees those photos!

Decide on the Purpose of Your Photo Book

Once you’ve decided who the target audience is, think about the purpose of your photo book. Is it to celebrate a special day, such as a wedding? Or is it a collection of memories from a shared experience, such as a vacation? It could even be a year in review, sent out to distant family members to keep in touch in touch.

Understanding your photo book's purpose helps you choose the right theme. While you can always begin any photo book project from scratch with a totally blank canvas, choosing a theme helps you stay on topic. You might choose a seasonal theme, maybe to showcase your favorite snaps from over the summer break. Or, you might want a special holiday-themed photo book to keep for posterity. You can even base your photo book’s theme around your pets!

Once you’ve picked the right theme, it’s time to shortlist your favorite photos for your project.

Choose Photos That Tell a Story

When you decided what your photo book was about, you essentially chose to tell a story. Whether that story is an adventure you took with a friend or a celebration of a child’s time at school, the photos you choose need to tell that story well.

Think about the first thing you want people to see when they open that photo book. This could be a sign pointing the way to a landmark, the first day of school, or someone about to open a present under the tree. Start your story at the beginning and go from there.

We love photo books because they evoke nostalgia and fond feelings. With that in mind, choose photos that make you emotional—happy, sad, and funny photos are likely to be shown off. Consider “awe” as an emotion too. Stunning landscapes, vistas, and sunsets are all examples of photos that can stir emotions even when no people are in the shot.

Avoid picking too many pictures that are very similar. Your favorite part of your story might be very meaningful to you. However, if you’re giving this photo book as a gift to someone else, they might be puzzled at the same shot of a particular beach bar over and over! Tell a chapter of your tale with a few photos and move on, keeping the book interesting, beautiful, and a real page-turner.

Pick Quality Photos

It’s normal to get excited on vacation or at any event and take hundreds of photos, particularly if you’re snapping them on your smartphone. But what are the chances of all those photos being stunners? Slim to none. That’s why it’s important to pick out the photos that really stand out, to raise the quality of your photo book and make it a brilliant gift or keepsake.

Things to consider for the best photos for a photo book include:

Is the resolution good? Will it look blurry when enlarged?
Is the photo blurred or sharp?
Is the photo cluttered, making it difficult to figure out what the focus is?
What’s the lighting like—too bright or too dark?
Is there something happening in the photo you wouldn’t want the recipient to see?

If you’re making photo books to give to others, make sure you have the permission of others in the photos to share them. For personal and family memory books, this is rarely an issue. However, for a wedding album where you might have dozens or even hundreds of guests, a disclaimer on the invite that they may be included in shared photos is usually sufficient.

If you’re not sure if the resolution of your photos is correct, simply upload them into the photo book editor and preview what they’ll look like once printed into a photo book. You can always swap the photos out for others if they don’t look as sharp as you expected.

Composition and Theme

Now you’ve eliminated blurry snaps or shots of your friend’s cousin who doesn’t like to appear in photos; you can start picking the best of the best photos for your photo book. Look for images that are artfully composed.

Things to look out for include:

Straight horizons and other horizontal lines should align with the top or bottom frame.
Trees, buildings, or other vertical lines should be perpendicular to the edge of the photo unless set at an angle purposefully to frame the subject.
Good use of negative space can bring your subject into focus.
Leading lines should draw the viewer’s eye to the subject.
Colors should go together for a great shot—both complementing and contrasting colors can have spectacular effects.
Photos should look as if they belong together or follow a theme.

With the Mixbook photo book editor, you can upload photos and adjust the layout as many times as you like, so you might want to have a couple of sets of photos that look great together. Try them next to each other to see what they look like on the page before you order your photo book.

Choose the Perfect Photo Book

You’ve picked high-quality photos that look great together and tell a story. Now it’s time to pick the right type of photo book to ensure those memories last for many years to come. You can choose softcover, hardcover, or even photo books that lay completely flat. You can also pick landscape, square, or portrait books in multiple sizes.

Finally, consider the book cover and the paper on which you want your photos to be preserved. The semi-gloss paper showcases vivid colors. Matte pages are ideal for more subtle, softer-focused images. For those more important projects, such as wedding albums, lustre paper is a low-glare, premium option.

Follow our tips on how to choose photos for a photo book, then get started with Mixbook to bring your project to life.