A Practical Guide to Selecting Photos for Memoir and Legacy Books

One key aspect of creating a memoir or legacy book is photo selection. For most life stories, images play the role of supporting the text, adding context, and engaging readers.

My advice: if your goal is to choose photos that fit with existing written text, do NOT start by opening a folder chock-full of images. Why? You are likely to face 2 problems:

Problem #1: beautiful images that don’t connect to your overall point

Problem #2: no images of the very thing you most want to represent (eg family dinners!)

Instead, clarify your vision and preferred format before you begin selecting images.

If your format is a portrait 6x9 trade book with mostly text, you could try for:

o 1 portrait image per chunk/chapter

o 1 portrait, 2 landscape images per chunk/chapter

o A few photos at the start and/or the end of the book

If your format is a landscape coffee-table book, you could aim for:

o 1 landscape image or 2 portrait images per ‘small chunk’ of text

One great way to begin thinking about format is to identify books that you have enjoyed – on any topic, not necessarily related to family history – and consider those as ‘models’ for the overall book design.

Selecting images for memoir or legacy books : Three approaches

How you approach selecting photos for your book will depend in part on your own personal workstyle and vision for the role of these images in your book. Following are two common and effective approaches

1. Instinctive / Inductive: Break your images up into piles of fewer than 100 images each

   1. Sort through the images for each section and select the images that fit your overall theme

   2. Choose images that you “react” to, instinctively. For this first pass, it doesn’t matter whether your reaction is positive or negative: if you instinctively engage with the image on an emotional level, consider including it in the text.
      

2. Logical / linear:

   1. Starting with text: in the margins, write a few words to identify images that you might want to find such as:

      1. Who (eg a photo of the whole family when Sue was a baby)

      2. A place (eg the interior of the old house before the reno)

      3. An incident (eg picture of getting a Christmas tree)

      4. Feeling (eg picture of kids being goofy)
         

3. Starting with overall criteria:

   Put your book aside, and create a list of overall criteria to guide your photo selection. For example:
   

   1. Who are the key people to include (in at least one photo each)?

      1. Family: Siblings, parents, spouse(s), children, grandchildren

      2. Work/Volunteer: Close colleagues, mentors

      3. Community: could be anything from book club to a religious group
         

   2. What context(s) should be represented (in at least one photo each)?

      1. Work: Office / professional environment and attire, special accomplishments

      2. Recreation/Hobbies – “in action” if possible

      3. Places: Home(s) – interior and/or exterior; School(s); Special spaces of rest – eg cabins, vacation spots; Photo(s) outdoors / on the land.

         
         

If you are sending your images to NextGen designers, they will be looking for

• A folder of images, as high-quality as possible

• A list (in Excel or Word) of captions, associated with filename and/or image number

Whatever approach you take to selecting your images, keep your vision in mind, give yourself a time limit, and have fun! If you need help along the way, just reach out and contact us.