The holiday season is a time for sharing the year's news with friends and relatives you don't often see. A great way to do that is to take those digital photos you've been accumulating all year and organize them into a custom photobook.

You may already be familiar with sites like Shutterfly, Photobucket, or the Kodak Gallery. These sites let you store your valuable photos while enabling you and your friends to view and print them. A photobook takes this idea a step further. Using premade templates, you can easily create an album with headlines, captions, themed graphics, and other elements (such as scanned art or collages). You can then order professionally printed copies as gifts or for your own use.

Photobook ideas

Photobooks aren't just for the holidays-they're a great way to organize all kinds of digital photos. Here are a few more ideas:

• Document your baby's first years with photos, cartoons, and other design elements.
• The whole family can compile a vacation scrapbook-combining photos, scanned-in mementos (like tickets and brochures), and written comments.
• Create an "art book" for each of your children, where they can showcase their drawings, paintings, writing, and other creative work.
• Use family photos to make a heritage book. Ask parents and grandparents to tell the stories that go with the pictures.
• Create a cookbook featuring your favorite meals and recipes. Include photos of the cooking process-and of everyone enjoying the finished product.

Before you begin

Creation of your photobook will go more smoothly if you take these steps first:

• Keep a journal during times like vacations, pregnancies, or weddings. This can provide the material for your photobook's text.
• Select the photos you're thinking of using and put them together in a file, in the order in which you'd like to see them in the finished book. That way, you won't have to search through hundreds of images while you're trying to create your photobook.
• Edit your photos before you begin. For instance, you can crop images, rotate or flip them, change them to black and white or sepia tones, or create special effects.
• Get creative. Use your scanner to capture printed materials, or use your computer's paint program or word processing programs to create splashy headlines, custom artwork, and cut-and-paste collages.

Conclusion

Online photo sites make it easy to create specialized photobooks for a wide variety of uses. These books help you get more enjoyment out of your digital photos, and make it easier to share that enjoyment with others.

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