I just finished created photo books for my sons and their wives Owen & Casey and Lee & Leah. I used Picaboo to create these books. The books actually took several months to compile. I have over 100 years of photos that I gathered from a lot of different family members. The books are fabulous!! The time consuming part is the actual gathering of the photographs. WOW, who knew gathering photos would consume most of the time. Here are some tips when creating a photo book with a large amount of pages.

• Create a file folder under Pictures or My Pictures “Picaboo Photo Album”
• Decide how you want to organize. Below are the folders I created for my two books.

• Owen (my oldest son by himself)
• Lee (my youngest son by himself)
• Owen & Lee (both boys together)
• Jerry’s Mother side of the family
• My side of the family
• Casey’s side of the family (Owen’s wife)
• Leah’s side of the family (Lee’s Wife)

During my photo search, I wanted to add school photos to show what how they changed through the years. They had lots of different pets so I wanted to make sure I added photos of all their pets. I took a cake decorating class when the boys were young so I wanted to add photos of some of the special cakes I made. As you can see I did several groupings of their different interests on the pages inside the book. Both books have around 300 photographs. Most of the photos had to be scanned since it was before the digital age. NOTE: For the digital photos I copied and pasted them into the appropriate files. In other words, I left the original in it’s folder.

I gave them a preview of what I was doing several months ago and they loved it. What is so great about this concept is the fact it is so compact and 300 photos are in just one photo book. The books highlight most of the events in their lives and gives them a sense of their heritage. Another thing, we all realized is that you can certainly see where certain family members get their looks. It has been a journey down memory lane. It was hard to tear myself away from the project. One thing I am sure of is I am glad I am FINISHED!!!

For you young mothers, the moral of this story is to take lots of pictures you’ll be glad you did one day. It seems that the first child has lots of photographs and then the photos start to taper off for each child after that. If you have a tradition or something that is unique in your family be sure to snap those shots so they can be recorded in your family history.