First-year photo book: from thousands of photos to a book

There aren't too few photos, there are too many – and there's no rule for when the choosing stops. The criterion "I'll pick the best ones" has no end: for every photo you can find a better one a little further on, and meanwhile the gallery grows faster than you can sort it. That's why most families end up with a cloud backup and the photo book is put off until there's time. That time never comes.

A month is a boundary that ends by itself. Twelve months means twelve small decisions instead of one big one, and the result gets a rhythm you can't create any other way: the child visibly grows across the pages, because the pages follow time, not how well each photo turned out.

The second thing worth giving up right at the start is completeness. A photo book is not an archive. The archive is the backup in the cloud and on a drive that nobody looks at anyway. A book is a selection you can hold in your hands, and its value grows with the number of photos you left out.

Printing works with a density of around 300 dots per inch. A photo from an ordinary phone has around twelve megapixels, that is roughly 4000 × 3000 pixels – at 300 DPI that gives an image more than thirty centimetres wide, which is plenty for a full page or even a spread. The problem isn't the camera, it's the route the photo took to reach you.

Reduced copies are created wherever data is being saved. A photo sent in a message is re-encoded and shrunk, a screenshot only has the resolution of the screen, digital zoom is just a crop from the middle of the shot, and backup apps often have a storage-saving mode that shrinks uploaded photos before storing them. In that last case the original exists only on the phone, not in the cloud – an unpleasant discovery when the phone is long gone.

In practice that means three things. Download photos in their original quality, straight from the gallery or the cloud, not from a conversation. Ask relatives to send their photos as file attachments. And when the editor shows a low-resolution warning on a photo, don't click it away – in print you'll see exactly what it's warning you about. Apple phones also save photos as HEIC; editors and printers reliably accept JPEG, so if the files won't upload, export them in the "Most Compatible" format.

A caption shouldn't describe what can be seen in the photo. It should add what can't be seen – and in a few years you'll be the only ones who still know it. Five forms that work:

A photo book is a view from the outside: it shows what the child looked like, not how they felt. In the early years it's mostly the parents who enjoy it – a child reliably recognises themselves in photos only at around two, and starts asking what happened behind a photo even later.

That's why first-year keepsakes usually come in pairs: something that keeps a likeness and something that keeps a thought. Photos go well with a hand and footprint, because it carries a sense of size that a photo can't, and a letter to the future that you write once and that gets opened many years later. More ideas are in our round-up of keepsake gifts for a first birthday.

Once the child is a bit older, looking at themselves won't be enough – they'll want to be inside the story. That's where the photo book ends and a personalised book begins: a story across 12 illustrated spreads in which the child is the hero. The illustrations are created from a single uploaded photo, so the hero looks like them, and the finished e-book is usually ready within 15 minutes. It doesn't compete with a photo book, it does something different: the photo book keeps what was, the story imagines what could be.