Share your family’s favorite moments with a personalized photo book—whether it celebrates the holiday season, the past year, or even a collection of years. Our unique designs include special touches—such as recipe pages, customizable timelines, family favorites, and room for family portraits—to guarantee beautiful presentations. You don’t have to wait until after the holidays to create one. Our Family makes a thoughtful gift any time of year.

Start by deciding the time span your book will represent. Is this a family annual that recounts the adventures you’ve shared in the past year? Or do you want to mark a major milestone, like a big birthday, someone’s retirement, or the birth of a child?

Next, think about who should be in the book—and who the book is being created for. Is this something you want on your coffee table, or is this a gift for family and friends?

Three different themes are captured with sections titled: Family and Friends, Memorable Days and Traditions and Celebrations. Review the page designs within each theme to see which will apply to your photo book.

The first Family and Friends page is a great place to paint a portrait of your family with a collage of pictures. How do you describe your family? Is it just the two of you, or are you a part of a large extended family with pets and close friends? Remember: If you need more places to put photos, you can always add a duplicate of this or any other page.

An idea for the Loved Ones page is to select photos of your family and friends that includes something that is meaningful. Photos of loved ones with a memorable expression, in a favorite place, or doing a special activity add a special touch to the celebration of the memories.

Family and Friends in Our Hearts is a place to honor the past. Try scanning in older photos and creating a gallery of historic family figures. This is also a place to showcase members of your extended family.

Memorable Days is the section to showcase highlights in timeline form. Think of the first 2 page spread as a place where you can tell your story spread over the holiday season, throughout the school year, or spanning decades. For example, commemorate a recent graduate with class pictures over the years ending with a photo in traditional cap and gown. Or, make a gift for a milestone birthday celebration with pictures that capture the progress from one life stage to the next.

If you are using the Memorable Days timeline to make a Family Annual, think of the best times you’ve spent with your family and friends this year: holidays, vacations, reunions, birthdays, school events and parties. Select a representative picture or two, remember how you felt during those occasions, and capture your thoughts in each text box.

An idea for the Favorites page is selecting photos that reflect the changing seasons, such as photos of your home decorated for the holidays, your garden in full bloom, a summer barbeque, or shots of autumn’s changing leaves.

For the Milestones page, bring together photos of different but significant events, such as climbing a mountain, a birth, losing a tooth, and a sporting event. To celebrate the Milestones of different family members, just use additional copies of this page.

Add as many of these pages you want to customize your Our Family photo book to suit your needs. For example; add School Days or At Play pages to showcase kids in action and their accomplishments. Use the Adventures page to chronicle a vacation or memorable trip.

The Traditions and Celebrations page can highlight holidays, events and parties. Select photos from your favorite family activities, such as building snowmen or baking pies. Honor family traditions, such as the annual trip to get a Christmas tree, and incorporate new traditions you’ve created—like a New Year’s Eve party or a cookie exchange. The page allows you to collage a series of pictures taken in a sequence, or pictures that are a mixture of times and places.

The Celebrate page, showcase photos of joyous moments—birthday parties, baby showers, bridal showers, family barbeques and more. Try making the first photo an introduction to the other photos on the page—maybe a shot of the birthday boy or bride-to-be. This is a great way to start the story of a celebration.

The Recipe pages are fun ways to commemorate a family recipe that has been passed down through generations, or something you’ve recently discovered that shows your culinary daring. The photo you select can be of the final dish or the proud creator.

For a dramatic effect, use a single image on a full-bleed-photo page. This is perfect for highlighting one of your favorite photos. Close-ups of faces filled with life are a great way to celebrate a person, but landscapes work particularly well, too—whether taken while traveling or at home.

The all-text page is a place to tell an extended story or add details where the photos only tell part of the story. This can be a place to recall facts or speak from your heart. You can even use a quote poem, passage from a book, or song lyric that you love, to say something special.