If you are an Apple user, you already have access to book making software in iPhoto. Many Mac and iPad users know that iPhoto lets you create photo books, cards and calendars, but did you know you could combine those photos with text and create a storybook? I have found that adding a few text pages to a my photos brings the stories behind the pictures to life. It's true that a picture can tell a story, but there can be many ways to turn those photos into memorable gifts.
My wife hates looking at photos on a computer or on her phone. She is a book lover. She reads all the time, and rarely is seen without a book. So, it is natural for her to want to have something to hold and enjoy at her leisure in her comfortable chair. One of the first books I created for her was an eclectic compilation of the best photos I could find from our vacations with friends, and family outings with our grandsons. I used iPhoto because it was simple. I decided on a hard cover book and selected the photos I wanted, letting iPhoto do most of the work. I added a forward at the beginning and that was all the text I needed to set the stage for the story that unfolded.
Since then, I have found there are many more stories I can tell by adding text to photos and photos to text. I have added other tools to my toolkit, like Blurb and Lulu for those books that require more options for layouts and text formatting, but I come back to Apple's iPhoto often. I find the more photos I take, the more I want to share.
Just recently, I used iPhoto to create a 100 page softcover book of our pilgrimage to the Holy Lands. It took me several hours and the book cost about $87 to have printed and shipped to me. I realized when I finished it that twenty years earlier, we had traveled to England and I put a photo album together by hand. That was in the days of 35 mm film and large binders with sticky back pages and plastic protectors. That project took me days to complete and cost hundreds of dollars in film developing costs. We still have that album, but I think I prefer the digital approach. If I ever need another copy of the book, I can just order it, rather than go through all the trouble to make another album.