From family milestones and vacations to special occasions, save your treasured memories in a beautiful and timeless personalized photo book. Photo books are not only great for showing off your favorite photos, but they are also the perfect gift or keepsake for you or a loved one to treasure for years to come. So how do you turn a hard drive of photos into a collection of memories? We’ll guide you step by step to make your own photo book customized perfectly to your taste. With Shutterfly, you can choose from a selection of book sizes, cover designs, bindings, and endless unique layouts. Make your memories last forever in an unforgettable personalized photo book with these easy steps.
Jump to:
- How To Personalize Photo Books
- Photo Book Covers And Bindings
- Photo Book Sizing
- Make a Photo Album Easily
- Personalized Photo Book Ideas
How To Personalize Photo Books
Enshrine your memories or create perfect gifts for friends and family by creating the best photo book possible. The secret? Personalization. You’ve already captured your favorite moments, now make a custom photo book that’s uniquely your own. With one-of-a-kind layouts, cover style options, decorative embellishments, and more, you have no limit to what you can do to make your album stand out.
Customize Your Layout
No two photo albums will be the same when you customize your layout. Maybe you want to share stories with text for every photo in your book, or perhaps you want to keep it simple and let your photos do the talking without any captions. Whatever style you’re planning for, you can move and resize photos and add text anywhere to design your book to your taste.
Pre-Designed Idea Pages
Not sure where to get started? Get inspired with pre-designed idea pages that make personalizing your photo book a breeze. Inspire your storytelling with unique pages that show off your favorite memories with fun colors, layouts, and extra embellishments. Use our family, everyday, seasonal, or year-in-review photo book styles to make a keepsake you treasure forever.
Add Stylish Embellishments
Whether you capture those pictures in a professional hardcover photo book or an easy-to-flip softcover album, you can personalize your book to your heart’s content. Spruce up your photo book by adding art, text, or design embellishments. Choose from stickers, ribbons, and frames to add an extra dose of elegance to your custom book. Go to the Embellishments tab to view available embellishments and simply click one to apply it to the current page (or click and drag it to the desired location).
Professional Six-Color Printing
Upgrade your book with professional six-color printing for smoother tones, subtle color blends, and more ink coverage on every page, so your photos print better. The professional six-color printing option will make your pictures pop with clarity and brightness. This printing option is a game-changer for sharing your favorite snapshots.
See-Through Memorabilia Pockets
Add a pocket to the inside cover of your family photo book to preserve special keepsakes such as tickets, holiday cards, birth announcements, photo strips, and other souvenirs. Memorabilia pockets are useful when it comes to taking a trip down memory lane and they can be applied to any printed photo book. The memorabilia pockets have adhesive strips to firmly attach themselves to the back of the chosen cover as well as a resealable front flap to further protect your memorabilia from dust and damage.
Photo Book Covers And Bindings
Your photo book will be as unique as the photos it showcases when you choose one of Shutterfly’s cover and binding options. Choose one of our standard options or upgrade to a premium cover to make your personalized photo book extra special. Whatever your style, choose from a range of covers — from elegant linen or crushed silk to genuine leather with stitched edges.
Deluxe Layflat Pages
Show off your best photos seamlessly with deluxe layflat pages that lay flat when your book is open, allowing for a seamless view across them. Perfect for wedding, baby, travel, and special occasion photo books, seamless layflat photo books are printed on double-thick pages made with satin-finish paper. They are available in Custom Path and Simple Path with hardcover books only, at an additional charge.
Available Sizes: 8×8, 8×11, 10×10, 12×12, 11×14
Standard Layflat Pages
Printed on matte-finish paper, standard layflat pages lay flat with a hinged binding. This style of page is perfect for printing photos of your family, vacation adventures, and everyday occasions for beautiful personalized photo books. Shutterfly’s layflat photo books are printed on high-quality paper and lay flat when the pages are open for a keepsake that beautifully showcases your best memories.
Available Sizes: 8×8, 8×11, 10×10, 12×12, 11×14
Hard Photo Cover
Available in both matte and glossy finishes, hardcover photo books are sleek and durable. Add metallic accents to the matte finish on the front and back to embellish your book with beautiful designs and personalized fonts. Opt for a matte photo cover for a scratch-resistant matte laminate that gives photos a classy look on the front and back. Instant Books are square, modern, and fast, making your hard cover photo books come together easily.
Available Sizes: 8×11, 11×8, 10×10, 12×12, 11×14
Soft Photo Cover
Move photos off your device and into your life with a coffee-table-worthy soft cover photo book— coveted for its textured finish. With a thick, glossy cardstock cover, your photos are showcased on the front and back in an easy-to-flip softcover book. Personalize the front and back covers of your book with your photos and custom text.
Available Sizes: 7×9, 8×11, 11×8, 10×10
Die-Cut Cover
Give your book a unique cover and feature a favorite photo in a die-cut window on the front. With leather, cloth, and linen options, this cover upgrade is made with high-quality materials that will enhance your custom photo book. A window on your cover reveals a colorful photo to showcase your theme in a premium photo book option.
Available Sizes: 8×11, 10×10, 12×12, 11×14
Premium Leather Cover
Perfect for all of life’s special occasions, Shutterfly’s high-quality premium leather cover features stitched edges and a gorgeous finish. Deluxe touches for things like high school graduation gifts or wedding photo books.
Available Sizes: 8×11, 11×8, 10×10, 12×12, 11×14
Professional Flush Mount Albums
Flush Mount Albums offer the quality of a professional photographer’s album at a fraction of the cost. These top-of-the-line albums feature board-mounted pages that go perfectly flat, allowing your wedding photos to spread across the page for a beautiful display. Flush Mount Albums offer eco-leather, photo cover, acrylic cover, and genuine leather cover options, as well as gilded pages, foil imprinting, and square or rounded corners to design an album perfect for your style.
Available Sizes: 8×8, 8×11, 10×10, 12×12, 11×14
Photo Book Sizing
Your photo books don’t have to conform to any particular size. They can be very small for a travel-friendly gift, large coffee table style books, or anything in between. There are tons of sizes to choose from, but the right one will depend on the nature of your photos and how many you’d like to include in the album. For more details on choosing the right size for your book, check out our photo album size guide.
- 7×9: These small soft photo cover books are perfect for keeping on hand or giving as little gifts. 7×9 photo books are a great option for collecting your favorite landscape photos.
- 8×8: A standard square 8×8 photo book is excellent for compiling an equal number of portrait and landscape photos, as it can easily accommodate a mixture of layouts and orientations. 8×8 albums are available in all book cover styles.
- 8×11: The most traditional book size, 8×11 photo books are a Shutterfly top seller because of their classic feel. These landscape photo albums are available in all book cover styles.
- 11×8: Standard portrait 11×8 photo books offer a professional look, perfect for graduation photos or a yearbook. Showcase your favorite portraits in these rectangular hardcover photo books.
- 10×10: A large square 10×10 photo book allows more images per page, both portrait and landscape. 10×10 books are available in all book cover styles.
- 12×12: Large square 12×12 photo books are wonderful for putting your best photos on display. Perfect for a wedding album or coffee table book, 12×12 books are available in hardcover, die-cut cover, and layflat books.
- 11×14: A large landscape 11×14 photo book provides beautifully printed pages, great for wedding photos, travel photos, children’s artwork, or a portfolio. Available in hardcover, die-cut cover, and layflat books, 11×4 books are great for showcasing locations, panoramas, and larger photos as you will hardly have to shrink the image to fit the page.
Make a Photo Album Easily
Put down the scissors and put that glue stick back in the drawer. Making photo books online is much easier, faster, and also gets a much more professional result. Your custom photo book preserves your treasured memories by converting your favorite pictures into a book that you or a loved one will treasure for years to come. Shutterfly offers three photo book services to make designing your album as easy as possible.
Make My Book Service
Leave your photo book to the pros with Shutterfly’s Make My Book Service. Make My Book is a photo book service that helps customers make their photo books. A Shutterfly designer will select your best photos, create your unique book in only 3 business days, and will email you when it’s ready. We will design and create a personalized photo book based on your specifications. Once we have completed your book, you will be able to preview and make additional changes if desired prior to ordering.
- Select your book size, choose from over 50 styles, easily upload up to 800 photos, and share any special instructions
- Your designed book will be ready for review in just three business days
- Order the designed book as is, or personalize it with your captions and finishing touches
- It’s free to get started, and a $9.99 service fee applies only if you order the designed book
Personalized Photo Book Ideas
When planning a photo book, the first step is deciding on a concept. A topic or theme, like documenting baby’s first year or showcasing your favorite vacation photos, will help serve as a guideline for designing your best photo book. Here are 10 ideas to get you started.
Gather Memories From Your Wedding Day
Your wedding photos deserve to be collected into a special wedding album. Display photos from the best day of your life in a layflat photo book. Showcase your big day with style and elegance to help relive your nuptial moments. With a professional-quality wedding album or premium wedding photo book by Shutterfly, you can preserve the special day forever.
Create A Wedding Keepsake
Create an elegant wedding guestbook to capture your loved ones’ advice and well wishes. Design a guestbook that’s uniquely yours with patterned backgrounds, pre-designed templates, and embellishments to make your personalized book a treasured keepsake.
Family Photo Album
Showcase your fondest memories with an album dedicated to what matters most: family. With family photo albums of your favorite holiday traditions or sweet pictures with the grandparents, celebrating your family’s special moments make a photo gift anyone would love to receive.
Showcase Your Engagement Photos
Present your engagement photos in a personalized photo book as an endearing collection of your love. Make a showstopping photo book by displaying sweet pictures from the day of your engagement or a photoshoot taken afterward, decorated with quotes about love and marriage.
Display Your Professional Work
Put your passion on display in a custom portfolio with a modern photo book. Whether your craft is photography, art, or design, chances are you have hundreds of photos to choose from. Give your hard work and effort the presentation it deserves in a beautiful custom photo book. Showcase your best work with this modern and minimal take on a traditional portfolio. Designed with a variety of color options and plenty of white space that allows your photos to take prominence.
Share Family Recipes
From grandma’s lasagna to mom’s apple pie, every family has recipes that bring you back to the kitchen in an instant. Pass these special moments on to future generations with a custom cookbook for an excellent personalized gift. This recipe book style features a variety of layouts that make it easy to copy and paste recipes and show off mouthwatering photos of your favorite dishes.
Celebrate Baby
Celebrate all of baby’s precious moments and milestones by making a photo book that displays all of your little one’s best snapshots. A baby photo book is one of the most important pieces of childhood mementos and a gift that will be treasured for a lifetime. Want to get a head start on your book before the baby arrives? Consider a pregnancy album that showcases your favorite maternity shots.
Document Your Adventures
Make the memories of your favorite vacations last forever with a travel photo album. With a professionally printed photo book, every moment of your adventure can be captured in a book you’ll cherish for years to come. Plus, these make beautiful coffee table photo books.
Display Your Kids’ Artwork
Easily save your child’s artwork by turning it into a keepsake photo book. With their artwork piling up over the years, repurposing it all into a custom book can be the perfect way to declutter without feeling the guilt of throwing their art away. Get them involved by choosing the right pieces to include in a book they can be proud of. Use this instructions guide on how to turn your kids’ artwork into books, canvas prints, photo mugs, and more.
Preserve Sports Memories
Sports photo books are a great way to showcase an athletic season, keeping some of your child’s favorite moments in a book they can look back on as they grow up. Celebrate their team’s year with photos of game days, victories, team parties, and cheering crowds. Customized with team colors and fun sayings, these make great personalized gifts for a supportive coach or your child’s teammates.
Related Resources
Photo books provide a fun way to organize all the photos you’ve taken. They are also an impressive way to relive memories with your friends and family. Whether you make your own or create a photo book online, make sure to add unique touches to your photo book to make it extra personal. With our step-by-step and theme ideas in mind, create your own photo book to keep or give as a gift.
