Social Archivist

As I’m working on our 2009 personal yearbook, I’ve been pondering how to display status updates alongside our photos – keeping it as interesting and readable as possible.

Here’s my current draft:  create a new blank page for year month and then just have the numbers signifying the day of the month.  Below each, show all the status updates on that day.  I’m skipping the time information – most of the time this isn’t too important.  If there were times which were particularly important, I could move those in. I’m using a different color for my husband’s updates, and I’ll use a different one again for my son’s.  A few updates I’m leaving off (links to websites usually) and I’m fixing minor typos as well!

While I had no trouble using Blurb for my son’s photo book, it is a little time consuming pulling in all the status updates and formatting them like this manually.  It’d be fantastic if I could set up a style like this, and they all get sucked in magically.

At 240 pages, it’s almost a page for every day I’m covering of my son’s first year. I’ve mixed in photos, scanned images, comments from Facebook, Twitter and his baby book. It’s a gift for his two sets of grandparents for Christmas, as well as a copy for us, and one for him when he one day leaves home.

I’ve used Blurb and am a little nervous about the quality as I’m pretty fussy and look closely at photos. Using their free tool Booksmart was an excellent experience – no crashes, no lost work (and I’ve been working on it for a while!) and no really annoying bugs while working with it. If you don’t like one of their many layouts, you can edit theirs or create your own, which came in handy every so often.   Even though I’m used to using Adobe CS4 tools, I didn’t feel like I was using a limited tool just for beginners and wish for more features.

It’s the second book I’ve made with Blurb – the first a wedding album for my brother-in-law and his wife which turned out well.  My next book is our 2009 annual.  When the year is complete, I’ll do a final export of our Facebook and Twitter status updates and combine them with all our photos which I’m still culling down.  I want to tell a story with the photos and content so we can remember the little things in the future.  I’m using iPhoto to organise all our photos with a smart album which pulls in all photos taken from this year.  If I delete photos from the smart album, they’re not deleted overall from iPhoto (handy when we often take photos of things for our website Throng).

I’d love to find other blogs where people talk about their process for making photo books, visual diaries, year books.  Have you spotted any?