Even though everything is becoming more digital, a photo book is a great way to capture special memories – be it a vacation, a family celebration or a creative photo project.

Especially when you want to compile photos for a specific occasion or theme, the question often arises: How do I quickly find the right pictures and where do I store them?

This is where Excire Foto comes into play! With its various intelligent functions, Excire Foto makes it much easier for you to select images. In this blog article, I’ll show you how you can easily plan and create your photo book with Excire Foto.

(To liven things up, I’ve garnished this post with a few pages from a photo book I created as a souvenir of a yoga trip to Italy).

1. What should your photo book be about?

Before you get started, think about it:

  • Theme: What event or project would you like to show in the photo book? Common themes are: Vacation, landscape photos from a specific region (maybe even over the years or from different seasons), an anniversary or birthday of a family member, friend or colleague.
  • Style: Should the photo book be organized chronologically or according to themes such as “family”, “landscapes” or “travel destinations”?
  • Size: How many photos do you want to use and how many pages should the photo book have? This will help you to narrow down your selection.

2. Select photos: How Excire Foto helps you

Thanks to Excire Foto’s intelligent functions, you can find your best pictures quickly and easily.
Here are a few ways you can go about it:

a. Search for keywords

Excire Foto automatically analyzes your pictures and tags them with suitable keywords. For example, search for “beach” or “mountains” to quickly find your best vacation pictures. This saves you the tedious task of sifting through folders. Many photographers have annual folders and subdirectories on their hard disk. That’s how I did it. But with Excire Foto you don’t really need that any more.
You can also use the free text AI search to describe an image that you know or think you should have in your photo collection. The results are not the same as in the keyword search. It is a different AI that is searching.

b. Find similar photos

If you have already selected a favorite photo, you can use the “Find similar photos” function to discover images with a similar style or motif. This makes it easier to create series or harmonious image groups.

c. Find people

Are you planning a photo book about friends or family? You can use face recognition to search for photos of specific people. Simply select a sample image and Excire Foto will find all matching images of the same person. You can even split this into individual portraits and group pictures using the face search.

d. Filter by date taken

Would you like to sort your photos chronologically? Use the “Date taken” filter to view the photos in the correct order – ideal for travel books or annual reviews.

e. Sort by aesthetics

If you’re not sure which are your best photos, you can also let the AI in Excire Foto sort them by aesthetics. The best way to do this is to mark a folder or a collection that you have previously created and set the sorting accordingly so that the best pictures (in the opinion of the AI) are at the top.

3. Organizing photos

To narrow down your selection further, you can use the rating and tagging functions in Excire Foto:

  • Give ratings: Mark your favorites with stars.
  • Use color markers: Assign colors to certain categories, e.g. “Group photos” or “Landscapes”.
  • Create collections: Create your own collection for your photo book. This way you have all your selected photos clearly organized in one place. You can even create a group of collections and manage several collections underneath if you want to assign your photos to individual chapters for the book. This is ideal for larger projects.

4. Editing and preparing photos

Excire Foto is not an image editing program, but you can transfer images directly from Excire Foto to editing software such as Luminar Neo or Photoshop.

Specifically, you can do this by right-clicking on a photo and selecting “Open with…”. This allows you to transfer the photo to any program for editing. Only Lightroom has difficulty with this as it cannot open images individually. In this case, and if you have a large number of images that need to be edited, we recommend a different approach: export the photos from your collection for the book to a separate folder using the export function. You can then edit the photos there and optimize them for the book. This will create some duplicate files on your hard disk. But you can delete them again when the project is finished. And if you forget to do this, as most of us do, the duplicate finder in Excire Foto will help you to get rid of the duplicate images later.

Pay attention when editing:

  • Image resolution: For printing, the images should have a resolution of at least 300 dpi.
  • Color correction: Make sure that the brightness and colors look harmonious so that your photo book has a uniform design. The color space should also be uniform. And if you are using a normal photo book manufacturer, the “sRGB” standard is also the correct color space here.

5. Layout and Design

Once the image selection is complete, you can design your photo book using software such as CEWE, Saal Digital, dm or other photo book programs. With Excire Foto you have all your pictures perfectly organized so that you can easily import them into the photo book software.

Here’s another tip:

The photo book programs often simply load the photos in alphabetical order by file name. If you have already sorted the collection manually in Excire Foto, your order may not be reflected in the photo book. However, you can use the “Batch rename” function in Excire Foto to name and number the photos consistently. Because I don’t like doing this with my original files, I prefer to export the photos to a separate directory. In Excire Foto, exporting and renaming can conveniently be done in the same step.

Tips for the layout:

  • Variety: Combine page-sized individual images with collages of several images.
  • Harmony: Use uniform designs and recurring elements to create a harmonious overall picture.
  • Add texts: Describe special moments or add interesting anecdotes to your pictures.
  • Have the courage to leave a gap: Leave some space around a photo. In graphic design, this is called “negative space” and is an important design element. It often looks more elegant than trying to fill every millimeter of the page.

6. Final review and Order

Before you order your photo book, check:

  • Are the pictures (and pages) in the right order?
  • Are there any typos in the text? – This often happens where you’ve already looked a thousand times, on the cover for example!
  • Do the image sizes and layout match and are all technical parameters adhered to?

If everything is right, you can order your photo book and look forward to the finished result!

Conclusion

Excire Foto is your perfect companion for creating a photo book. The intelligent search and filter functions save you a lot of time and make selecting images easy. With a little planning and creativity, you can create a unique photo book that captures your best memories.

Have fun creating your photo book! 😊

P.S.: I’ve got a discount code for Excire Foto for my readers! If you enter the code roggemannphoto at checkout, you’ll get 15% off.