How to create a Blurb Book from Lightroom

Every year we all take thousands of pictures of our families, with “big cameras” and phone cameras and everything in between. We try to back them up and store them in electronic clouds but how often do we print our images? There is something so wonderful about the tangible that we can hold, and display in our homes so that we can gaze at those memories every day. My sweet friend Emily inspired me to start creating family year books. She does this every year and prints one for each one of her children at Christmas time. I can say without a doubt that these are our favorite books to look through and the ones that our kids reach for time and time again!

The challenge in creating these is organizing all the photos, formatting the book and then getting it sent off for printing. Let me suggest a way to make this easy for yourself! You can create your entire book in Lightroom which is where I already store my images anyway. Making it easy to toggle back and forth between the book and develop module to make image adjustments. (See video at end of post). This made the process so easy, and I sent it off for printing with the click of a button! Read on for some tips to make this an easy seamless process for yourself to catalog your family memories. And view the video for step by step directions and tips.

If you contact blurb via this link; https://www.blurb.com/swatch-kit they will send you a swatch kit with the different papers that are available for their books. They will also send you a promo code that lets you apply the cost of the swatch kit  toward your book purchase. I’m really picky about the printing of my images as I should be! I spend hours getting it correct in camera and then editing to make sure all of the colors are perfect. I want all this work to be showcased in the final prints. So being able to see the sheen, coloring and weight of the different papers before I invest in printing the book is really helpful!

Like I said these are our children’s favorite books!

For vacation pages I like using the large two page spreads so that you can see the images blown up.

For small cell phone pics that aren’t high quality and don’t need to be blown up you can use the grid layout to still be able to display them and journal about the events on the opposite side. I also scanned in a lot of the kids artwork so that we could have a copy of it to remember and look at without having to keep all the loose paper originals.

Click on the image below to see the video for step by step directions and tips to creating your own.

If you have trouble viewing the video on a small cell phone screen open on your computer. 🙂 Let me know if you have any questions!