How To Create a Family Yearbook in 15 Minutes a Month

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Last updated on June 24th, 2022 at 12:25 am

I worked with a client who used the closet under the stairs for the most incredible purpose. Family photo books and scrapbooks lined the shelves of this closet like a miniature library. This client created books for every vacation, season, holiday …everything. And her kids love to find a comfy spot on the floor of the closet to peruse these gems that tell their story. 

It was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.

And it put me to shame when I thought about my weak attempts at keeping up with memories. 

Inspired by my client, I decided to step up my game with family photo booking.

I made a goal at the beginning of 2019 to keep up with our family memories. But it wasn’t a goal that was growing well. As I did my goal review for the fall, I knew it was time to actually do something about it.

Surprisingly it wasn’t that hard and after just a couple of months, I developed a system to make sure it gets done every month.

I’m not going to attempt to create a book for everything …that’s more of a hobby. My goal is to have pictures in a book that commemorates our year and tells a story about what we did.

Here’s how I caught up on my 2019 family yearbook and the system I use to keep up with it in just 15 per month.

The first thing I did was find a photo book layout I like in Shutterfly.

If you’ve ever used Shutterfly for photo books, you know they’ve got a ton of options, and this is one of the reasons I love it. I think they have really beautiful layouts and the user interface is easy enough to figure out.

Here’s a post with my favorite Shutterfly photo book layouts.

I also love that Shutterfly will connect with other photo accounts such as Instagram and Google Photos.

I’ve talked more about using Google Photos and why it’s such as life-saver, ahem, space-saver, in this post here.

Next, I needed to decide how I wanted to structure my family photo book.

Since this photo book is for the entire year, it made the most sense to break it up by month. Then I created pages within each month for specific events.

Once I chose my layout and structure, I tracked down recordings of our events and memories.

A lot of people use Facebook or Instagram to track family events and memories. Our family mostly uses a shared Apple photo album. 

We’ll add captions with funny quotes or a little bit of context. If we didn’t write anything, at least I’m reminded about certain events or happenings in our life.

Now that I had the events and memories I wanted to record, I was ready to choose which photos to add to my family yearbook.

(Side note: I don’t really use a regular camera anymore, so I didn’t need to worry about uploading those to my computer. But I do download pictures from my iPhone to my computer at the same time as doing all this so I can make room in my storage.)

All of my photos are backed up from my iPhone onto Google Photos so I connected Google to Shutterfly. However, it’s really hard to choose photos directly from the timeline feed of Google Photos. I ended up going through the timeline and choosing the best photos to added to a “Best of 2019” album in Google Photos.

This part was key because I just had to “select all” in the “Best Of” album to add the photos to Shutterfly.

Once the photos are added to the photo queue, I start created my pages.

The key to updating a family yearbook in 15 minutes a month.

Now that I’m all caught up, at the end of every month, I follow the same process as before and just add new pages to my family yearbook.

1. Track down the memories I want to record in my family photo book.
2. Add the pictures I want to my “Best of 2019” Google Photo album.
3. Upload the photos to my Shutterfly photo book project.
4. Create the pages for the new month.

Once January rolls around, I’ll finalize the photo book and wait for Shutterfly to have a sale. (They always do, which is one of the reasons I love Shutterfly.)

Use these steps to create a family yearbook. Get caught up on the past years or get set up for the coming year. Then spend 15 minutes a month bringing it up to date. By January, you’ll have a beautiful photo book for your family to enjoy!

Need an easy way to keep track of your memories? Download the FREE Family Memory Journal from the RNL Resource Vault. Get it here >>>