Creating A 50th Anniversary Photo Book

A photo book makes a great 50th anniversary present, and is a fun thing to put together. Here are some tips to help you along the way.

Compiling Your Material:

Start early! The more time you give yourself to start and complete this project, the better the finished product will be in the end. Start of course by getting some photos of the couple’s wedding. If you are creating this book as a surprise to the anniversary couple, you may have to be a little sneaky in order to complete this step. If you visit often, you will have to find out where the photos are and how to get them somewhere that you can scan and return them without being noticed. If you don’t have access to the photos, enlist the help of someone who does, such as one of your siblings or a family friends, or whoever you need to in order to get these photos.

Of course, you won’t just want photos of the wedding. If possible you will want to somehow represent all of the 50 happy years that the couple has had together. In order to accomplish this, you can either sneak more photos from their house, or, better still, gather as many photos as you can from the family and friends of the couple. Why is this better? The main reason is that when you widen the circle of where you are gathering the photos, you are more likely to get photos that the couple hasn’t seen, or hasn’t seen many times over the years.

As you are gathering your photos, see if you can get some of your contributors to give you some stories and anecdotes about the couple. One way to do this is to send out questionnaires so that your participants can fill in answers as they see fit. You might also ask them to write a paragraph or two about the photos that they send you and the reasons that the photos are special to them, and what great memories they hold.

Try to include all of the things that the couple has accomplished together, and include plenty of photos of their kids, both as youngsters and grownups.

Arranging and Organizing:

Your anniversary photo book will work best if it is organized in some way, rather than looking like just a bunch of random photographs. Start with the wedding photos and move forward from there through all of the years as best you can. Include the snippets and stories that you have gathered and come up with some titles for the different sections, such as “Beginnings” or “the San Diego Years” or whatever works best for the trajectory of your book. If you are new at layout and design, you can either enlist the help of a family member who knows something about these things, or download some templates online.

Printing and Binding:

Use the highest quality printing that you can afford, such as digital color. When it comes time to bind your book, you can either use an online service, or do the binding yourself. Thermal binding machines are the ones that are used to create hardcover books, and there are many models that can be easily found for less than 0 new. These machines are very fun and easy to use as well, so you can make as many books as you want, for whatever occasion, whenever you want, and save a lot of money in the process.