How to turn old family photos into a book
Most family photos die in a box. Not because nobody cares about them, but because a box has no order, no captions, and no reason to be opened. Turning them into a book fixes all three at once. Here is how to do it without losing three weekends.
First, find out how many photos you actually have
Before deciding anything, empty the box and count roughly. The number changes the whole approach. Under 200 prints and you can look at every single one. Over a thousand and you need to sample rather than sort, or you will still be sorting next year.
Sort into decades while you count. You do not need exact dates yet, and you will not have them for most photos. A rough pile per decade is enough structure to make every later decision easier.
This is also when you find out what you are missing. Almost every family has a gap where a whole era went undocumented, and it is better to know that now than to discover it halfway through laying out a book.
Digitise: a phone camera is fine, a scanner is better
A flatbed scanner at 600 DPI is the right tool for prints you care about. It is slow, roughly a minute per photo including placement, but the result holds up when printed at full page size.
For everything else, photograph the prints with your phone. Lay them flat near a window, avoid direct sun, and shoot straight down rather than at an angle. Modern phone cameras out-resolve most consumer scanners already; the thing that ruins phone shots is glare and skew, not resolution.
Do not retouch anything at this stage. Scratches, colour casts, and faded corners are far easier to judge once you see the photos laid out together, and most of them turn out not to matter at book size.
Name the files by decade as you go. Ten minutes of naming now saves an hour of squinting later.
Choose far fewer photos than feels right
This is the step people get wrong. A book of 300 photos is an archive, and nobody reads an archive. A book of 40 photos is a story, and people read it more than once.
The test for keeping a photo is not whether it is a good photograph. It is whether it shows something the other photos do not: a room nobody has been in for thirty years, a car, a haircut, two people standing closer than you expected. Four near-identical shots of the same birthday earn one slot between them.
Blurry is not automatically out. A blurry photo of someone who was rarely photographed beats a sharp one of a landscape. Technical quality is the last criterion, not the first.
Put them in an order that carries something
Chronological is the obvious order and it is usually right, because it is the one order a reader can follow without being told what it is.
The exception is when the family splits across places. If half the photos are from one country and half from another, grouping by place and running each group chronologically reads far better than interleaving them by date and making the reader jump continents every spread.
Whatever order you pick, keep it. A book that is chronological for forty pages and then thematic for ten feels like it lost its nerve.
Write the captions, because the photos will not explain themselves
In twenty years nobody will know who is on the left. Write it down now, while someone still remembers, and ask the oldest person available before you finish this step rather than after.
Good captions state facts and stop: who, where, roughly when, and one thing that is not visible in the frame. The last part is what makes a caption worth reading. "Dad outside the shop, 1974, the year before it closed" does more work than three sentences about how much the shop meant to everyone.
Where you genuinely do not know, say so. An honest "somewhere in the early sixties, nobody is sure who took it" is better than a confident guess that gets repeated as fact by the next generation.
Turn it into an actual book
Laying out a photo book by hand in design software works and takes a long time. The tedious part is not the design taste, it is the mechanical work: sizing every image to its frame, keeping margins consistent across eighty pages, and reflowing everything when you add one more photo in the middle.
That mechanical layer is what Yujee automates. You upload the scans, describe what was going on, and it groups the photos, lays out the pages, and writes a first pass of the captions for you to correct. What comes out is a 300 DPI print-ready PDF: you can keep it as it is, or send it to any print shop or online printer for binding. Yujee does not print or ship the book itself.
Whichever route you take, print at least one physical copy. A PDF gets backed up and forgotten. A book on a shelf gets picked up by people who were never going to go looking for a file.