With seven cats and seven grand kids, my wife, who’s a point and shoot type of girl, accumulates an abundance of pictures in a years time. She’s a great sharer of those pictures and would have me make them into photo books so she could send them to friends and family alike. With the cost of printing the photo books and the postage, that got expensive after a while. Photo booklets were a much more economical means of sharing them. Fold-up photo booklets are cheaper to print and cheaper to mail along with a regular letter.
Using a DP (Desktop Publishing) Program, you can make a multiage photo booklet in minutes. Serif Software’s PagePlus is a good DP program to start out with because it’s intuitive. Download PagePlus SE free or download the full-featured version, PagePlus 9, for just $9.99. I reviewed both programs here on Factoidz and included a link to the download site.
You will also need a photo-editing program to resize your photos, crop them, remove red eye, add captions, etc. I use PhotoShop Elements but you can use almost any photo-editing program. Your camera probably came with a good basic photo editing software program. There is also a plethora of freeware programs, programs that are easy to learn and that do an excellent job. Here’s a link to the top ten-freeware programs.
Here’s what your need to make a photo booklet.
For paper I use the Epson 8 ½” X 11”. Matte finish, double-sided photo papers (SO41568). Fifty sheets of Epson SO41568 will cost you about $13.00 online but it’s quality paper and well worth the cost. If you are on a real tight budget you can use regular 8 ½”X11” inkjet paper, but I strongly recommend the double-sided photo paper.
You will be using 8 pictures for each fold-up booklet so collect all the pictures that you want to use ahead of time and scan them into the computer and save them as JPEG photo files. Create a file folder in your picture folder and name it for this project. Having all the pictures that you will be using in one folder will make the project go faster.
Laying out your page, front and back.
Looking at the illustration below you will see that I have divided the page into four equal parts and numbered them from one to eight. The orientation of the numbers shows how hose photos should be oriented. The photos on the top half of the page are positioned upside down just as the numbers are shown.
- Using PagePlus to layout your page
- Open PagePlus SE or PagePlus 9
- Pull down the “File Menu” and click on “Page Setup”
- The page setup dialog box opens. Make the selections as shown below
- Click OK.
- Pull down the “File Menu” and select “Layout Guides.”
- The “Layout Guides” dialog box opens with the “Margins Tab” open. If the “Guides Tab” is open, click on the “Margins Tab” to open it.
- Make the selections as shown be low.
- Click OK
- Your divided page will appear with 1/8” margins and row and column gaps.
- your page should look like this
- Pull down the “Insert File Menu” and select “Picture” and click on “From File”
- The “Import Photos” dialog box opens.
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- Navigate to where the photos are stored on your computer and double click the photo to import it.
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- Double click a photo to import it.
- Once imported you can use the sizing buttons on the picture and the rotation tools to size it and rotate it to fit.
- Once all the pictures have been imported, sized, and positioned on both the front side and the rear side of the sheet, it’s time to send it to the printer.
- Once printed follow this guide to fold the fold-up booklet.
