My holiday photo album – how to start?

After a family vacation or a trip abroad, you return home, sometimes with a few scratches or insect bites, but almost always with amazing impressions and usually very many pictures. As the itchy mosquito bites and holiday memories fate, you may want to protect your holiday pictures from sinking into a digital nirvana and preserve the days of happiness in vivid colours. Printing a holiday photo album is ideal to preserve the happy memories for you, but is also a perfect gift idea for close friends and family.  

Travel Albums

Some hints for designing your next travel album with your pictures:


Reduce the number of images in your selection

If you are snap-happy like your correspondent, you will have taken very many pictures during your holidays – a very common phenomenon. If the picture-harvest is rich, sort the pictures and reduce the selection to the best pictures of each event or day. Consider how you will want to browse your holiday photo album in ten or twenty years time and reduce the number of pictures accordingly, avoiding repeat pictures of the same place or event. Instead of sorting the holiday pictures chronologically, sorting them by topic is often more effective. A folder with pictures of the hotel or place where you stayed, a folder of pictures of eg the beach – independent of the day you visited, etc. Having fewer pictures allows you to display some special pictures in a larger, full-page format. Landscapes look even more impressive when laid out on a double page spread. Unlike with wall art prints, where bigger is prettier, you usually browse a photo album while holding it  in your hands, near your eyes; therefore your holiday album doesn’t need to be enlarged in XXL-format. However, varying the picture frame formats and sizes makes the book more interesting and allows you to set highlights. An A4 landscape picture is impressive when set in a photo album. Use full pages and occasional double page spreads on outstanding pictures. When distributing several images on a page, use simple, narrow, white frames around pictures, specially on top of coloured backgrounds. If you want to highlight an interesting or funny photograph among images of the same size, turn the picture frame by a three to six degrees. It sets a distinction in the layout.

Rotate frames to highlight pictures

This could interest you: Create and post real photo postcards with your own holiday pictures right from your smartphone.


As long as the memories are fresh, it is good practise to note the names of people and places. Even maps with driving, cycling or hiking routes can easily be inserted into private travel albums. This effort is an investment in the future, when the names of some places and holiday acquaintances will otherwise be forgotten.

Safer to use a photo book designer app or software client than just a web browser session

You have a range of options to print a photo album online, such as Bonusprint, cewe photobook, FotoInsight, Photobox or Snapfish. Some allow creating photo album projects through your browser without installing an app, however, installing an app is the safer and more flexible option. To find the best option, you may consult photo book reviews. Your correspondent creates her photo albums with the FotoInsight Designer. FotoInsight prints with the European leader and multiple award winner cewe photo book. The FotoInsight photo book software is available for Windows, Mac and Linux and as apps for Android and iOS. The software has the greatest range of design options of all free photo book apps, yet is reasonably intuitive. When it comes to photo book formats, sizes, covers and page coating finish, no other photo book printer offers a wider range of options. The choice is so large, that it may initially seem overwhelming. There is a blog post that helps with choosing the right paper qualities and glossy and matt finish options for your holiday photo book: https://iitm.be/photobooktypes

Travel photo books