Thursday, April 2, 2009

Home made photo book using PowerPoint

My grandkids love to see themselves in photos and especially love it when I make a little story book that is all about them. Now I know you can go the professional route with photo books, and I do that too, but this is the fast, home made version. These books don’t have the polish and pizzazz of professional books but my grandies love them anyway and read them to death. They are ‘for now’ books, not keepsakes.

Here’s my recipe. I create my books using 4 pieces of A4 white 200g card stock printed on both sides. They are printed in landscape with two story pages to a side. The binding is done by punching holes along the centre line and then stitching through the spine with a big needle and strong thread. I use crochet cotton. Too easy! The hard part is working out where the pages go so that when it is all put together, the pages turn over in story order.

I solved that by creating a PowerPoint template with 8 slides, each with the appropriate page number at the bottom of the two sides. Now I can insert images and put in text in the right order. I don’t use the word processor as I prefer the ease with which PPT lets you move and adjust text and images on a page. It is best to downsize your images to 72dpi before inserting them in to PowerPoint. A full story page photo would be about 135mm x 220mm x 72dpi.

Printing has its challenges as you must get the right pages back to back for the book to work. Here is how it goes for a 16 page book.

P1 / P14 back to back with Cover/Back
P3 / P12 back to back with P13 / P2
P5 / P10 back to back with P11 / P4 and
P7 / P8 back to back with P9 / P6

How you layout your book is up to you. I’ve made them two ways as you can see in the image. I’ve also mixed it up – it depends on how many photos I have and how much I want in the story. The examples I’ve given here are my GD’s 3rd birthday. On the back cover, I put a colouring in image so she can add something herself to her book.



The download has the A4 landscape .ppt file as shown on the far left. If you need to alter the page dimensions to suit another page size, go to File/Page Setup and enter your own values.

Sorry, link has expired. Check the DustyD website instead.

1 comment:

KimR. said...

Jan, What a clever idea! I need to remember this the next time I want to do a book. Thank you for the idea and template!

Hope you're doing well. I miss all of my Den friends.