Most people start by opening a gallery of nine thousand images and scrolling. Two hours later they have forty favourites, no sequence, and a strong feeling that something is missing.
The method is the problem, not the archive. Choosing by “is this a good photograph” produces a highlight reel. Choosing by “does this move the story forward” produces a book.
Send more than you need
Roughly four photographs fill a page, so a 16-page magazine needs about 64. Send 100 to 120 for that, not 64.
The spare ones are what make the layout work. A designer needs choices: two versions of a moment so one can run large, a horizontal to pair with a vertical, a quiet frame to sit opposite a busy one. A tightly pre-edited set of exactly 64 removes every one of those decisions.
| Size | Pages | Send this many |
|---|---|---|
| Small | 8 | 50–60 |
| Standard | 16 | 100–120 |
| Generous | 24 | 140–170 |
| Full | 40 | 220–260 |
The four everyone forgets
These are what make a book feel like a life rather than a feed.
The bad day. The rained-out afternoon, the argument, the food poisoning. A book with no friction in it is a brochure.
The place, empty. The flat before the furniture, the office at 8pm, the hostel corridor. Nobody photographs these deliberately and they date better than anything staged.
Whoever took everything. The person holding the camera is in none of it. Ask other people for the four pictures of them that exist.
Something with no people in it at all. A meal, a road, a door. It gives the eye somewhere to rest between faces.
What to cut first
In this order, and it goes faster than you expect.
- Near-duplicates. Five frames of one pose: keep a single frame, and prefer the one where somebody was not ready over the posed one.
- Pictures that need explaining to the recipient. If they were not there and a caption cannot fix it, that is your memory rather than a shared one.
- Anything kept only because it is technically good. A sharp photograph of nothing is still nothing.
- Screenshots and downloads, unless they carry information the book actually needs.
Put them in order before you send
Chronological is almost always right, and it reliably beats a clever structure. A book that moves forward through time gives the last page something to arrive at.
If the material has no chronology — a friendship, a person’s character — group by theme instead, and decide the running order of those themes before sending anything. Either way, decide it yourself. It is the only part of this a designer genuinely cannot do for you.
What to put in a photo magazine →
The calls the method does not make
Everything above is mechanical: how many, what order, what to cut. It works for most of an archive and then stops, because a few photographs are not a quality judgement at all — they are a decision about a person.
Those are the ones that take the time, and each has its own guide.
The photographs themselves
- Choosing between two near-identical photographs
- Group photos, and why they are hard
- Using blurry photographs on purpose
- Selfies in a printed book
- Printing screenshots and chat threads
The people in them
- Photographs of someone who has died
- Photographs where someone looks bad
- When someone does not want to be in it
- Photographs of other people’s children
- Photographs of an ex-partner
The set as a whole
- How many photographs is too many
- What to leave out, deliberately
- Sorting by story rather than by date
- Recovering photographs from an old phone
The one principle underneath all of them
A book is an edit, and an edit is allowed to leave things out.
That sounds obvious and it is the thing people most need permission for. Almost every hard call on this page — the unflattering photograph, the ex-partner, the person who asked not to be included, the year that went badly — gets easier once you stop treating the book as a complete record it was never going to be.
A gap in a book is not a lie. A book with everything in it is not a book, it is a folder. What to leave out, deliberately →
Costs and sizing
₹499 for 8 pages up to ₹1,099 for 40, flat ₹70 delivery anywhere in India. Count first, then pick a size: a full 16-page book beats a padded 24-page one and costs less.
Size, pages, paper and price →
Frequently asked
How many photos do I need for a photo book? About four per page, so roughly 64 for a 16-page magazine — but send 100 to 120 so the layout has choices.
Should I edit them down before sending? No. Send the wider set in the order you want it. Over-editing first removes the pairings and rhythm the spreads get built from.
What order should the photos be in? Chronological, unless the subject has no timeline. It is the structure that most reliably gives a book a beginning and an end.
Which photos do people always forget? The bad day, the empty room, the person who took all the pictures, and at least one frame with nobody in it.
Can you choose for me? We sequence and lay out what you send and flag anything too small to print well. Which memories belong in it is the part only you can decide.
Part of our complete photo magazine guide. See also: photo resolution for printing and layout and spreads.
Start with what you have: Photo magazines from ₹499 · Hardcover albums from ₹1,299