How to create a beautiful book of self printed photos, or what I did with 104,000 photos in LR

Discussions
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3 books
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I would like to share with you my process of creating three beautiful books of self printed photos. I wanted to create a few books of my best photos. After looking at too many hideously ugly black plastic portfolios, I found a woman online who makes these beautiful (expensive, but worth every penny) cloth covered “screw post portfolios”. They come in many colors, shapes, and aspect ratios. It is possible to emboss the front cover like I did, and there are other print styles and methods available. I chose a square shape to match with 12x12 Luster paper made by Red River. You can make the book as thick as you want to contain many many photos, but I found thicker than an inch and a quarter seemed too bulky and un “book like”. This thickness contained about 40 photos using the RR Luster paper.

posts
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holes
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There is not really any hole punched paper available. In addition to the holes, the paper has to be scored to allow easy movement of the paper. Hahnemuhl and Moab used to make scored, hole punched paper, but it is not available any more. You could punch your own paper, but turning a page of stiff photo paper is clumsy and unwieldy and when opened, the page won’t lie flat. So voilá, these hole punched strips have a half inch of stiff materiel, then a very flexible 1/4 inch wide strip which allows easy movement of the print, and on the border opposite the hole a 1/4 adhesive strip. You peel off the protective paper and line the print up and press down. I chose different colors book covers to match the geography: green for Eastern Sierra, orange for Zion, and reddish brown for the Southwest. Here is what a print looks like opened, followed by a side view of the books.

open book
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side books
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In addition to being fun, I learned a lot about printing and feel like I finally have become an expert at printing. I soft proofed every print, but because I am a perfectionist, I found I had to make anywhere from 2- 10 tries to get the photo perfect. I also learned that it is not always possible to predict which screen photos will make good prints.

The other thing that amazed me is that out of 104,000 prints in my Lightroom catalog, I only came up with about 200 photos to put in the “possible” file. I culled these down to 120 prints. Almost 20 years of digital photos and all I could come up with was 120 that seemed worthy to be in a book of my best photos! Actually when I think about it, 5.2 great photos a year isn’t bad.

If you are interested in purchasing these portfolios books email me and I will send you the contact info. The cost for one book, two lines of embossing, the hardware, and 40 hole punched adhesive strips was around $280. I had multiple email interactions with her asking questions and she was extremely helpful. The embossing was expensive, close to $100, so if you skip that it would be much more affordable.

Finally, feel free to ask me any questions, either on this thread or you can email me privately.

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Hi Tony,

First, congrats on getting these books created! They look awesome and you should be very proud of the work you did to get this done! Kudos to you! Your hard work and dedication has certainly paid off.

I have always wanted to print/publish my own coffee table book; if anything just a Blurb-type self publish for my own enjoyment. (I lack serious marketing skills to try and have a real book published and marketed! Although if I did a book on Yosemite, it would be titled something like: “Yosmite Valley: The Unseen.” In otherwords, avoid any classic Tunnel View, Yosemite Falls, Half Dome, El Cap landscapes…)

I’m also pretty sure I would never spend $280 for even my own, personally created effort (and I’m sure that doesn’t include your printing costs!) For you personally, most certainly worth the effort and expense! Congrats, you should be proud!

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Thank you Lon. I was partially motivated by having to help my wife go through sorting through boxes of old family photos, most of them throw aways, and realizing that after I die my children will have to deal with my computer hard drives and the (104,000 and running) digital files on it. If I have three, or maybe in the future one or two more books like the ones I just made I can tell them this is all they need and they can just throw away my hard drives. Re the family photos, I spent a year collating the boxes I got from my parents and grandparents, scanned the ones worth keeping, and created a Blurb book that was family history, many written pages, and copies of all the family photos worth keeping. I gave all my siblings and children a copy. Then I threw away the boxes of photos. Phew. It’s a gift to anyone’s children to get rid of as much of your stuff as you can before you die.

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Tony,

OMG, this is my current and exact dilema!!! Forget the starting fact that I have over 15,000 35mm slides, I too have thousands of family photos, documents, writings, etc. etc. I’m a junkie when it comes to this stuff, sentimental stuff that I just can’t throw away. On the flip side, I don’t want my only son to have to weed through all of when I’m gone.

Years ago, I took all my Dad’s old 35mm slides from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, projected them, took digital pictures and ultimately created a DVD set for my siblings and a few other family members. But I still have the 40+ boxes of slides that I haven’t got up the nerve to toss away. I was just chatting with my sister who has hundreds and hundreds of historical family photos (think 1890’s, early 20th century) She did geneology for a number of years… but now who wants those old photos?

Anyway, it’s good to know I’m not the only one… and I imagine many, many, even just NPN members are facing the daunting task of “downsizing”, tossing away stuff that plain and simple, we just have no use for any more - and more importantly our offspring and younger generation of family members are most likely not interested in this old stuff either.

And just today… after David posted the new “25 years of NPN” discussion, I went looking for one of those early NPN posted images. For me, late 2006 would have been my first post. Anyway, one of the early images I found that I may post in that thread… get this, I have no less than 17 copies of the same image! either raw, processed, resized for the web, thumbnails, etc. If I have 17 copies of 1 single image, imagine how many files I have on my computer! No wonder I have upwards of over 5TB of images files! Yikes!

Anyway, I commend you on not only attempting the huge project, but for following through. You’ve motivated me to get working on mine… Thanks! I think.

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Re family photos, I wasn’t really interested in family history and photos until I was in my 40’s. My grandparents had all been long gone and my parents and uncles (no aunts) were aging and I realized that soon the oportunity to get information from them would be gone. So I became very interested and collected all the photos from various family basements, and there they sat in my closet until I was in my 60’s and my uncles and parents had died. Fortunately I had hit them all up for family lore and wrote it all down. So I spent a couple of years writing the text for the family history and then scanned the keeper photos and created the book. It was very time consuming but incredibly fulfilling. The point of this is that watching my various cousins and nieces and nephews, few of them in their 30s were/are all that interested in family history, but the older they get the more interested they become. My guess is if your son is not interested now, he will be very interested as he ages and certainly will be after you die. So…do it. Make a book for him. P.S. If you use Lightroom, it is linked with Blurb and you can easily move photos around, in and out of the book, and even edit them in LR and the edits will appear in the book. That is why I used Blurb for my book.