Week 1: Turn Your Digital Photo Overload into Easy Printed Photo Albums


LEVEL UP YOUR PHONE PHOTOGRAPHY

WITH GABRIELLE TOUCHETTE

•••

Welcome to Week 1 of 2025!

In today's e-mail, you'll get:

PHOTO TIP OF THE WEEK: get into the habit of printing your photos

INSPIRATION OF THE WEEK: my most cherished possession

PHOTO OF THE WEEK: experimenting is greater than perfection

RESOURCES YOU MIGHT LIKE: 50% off upcoming workshop

PHOTO TIP: Transform your photo overload into printed books

I can’t start a new year without talking about printing photos. Taking photos of everyday life with our phones is easy.

But sorting through the hundreds of digital photos piling up on our phones? Pulling out the best ones? Printing them into books?

That’s the overwhelming part!

I want the process of printing photo books to be as easy as possible for you, so today I’m sharing a system I developed for myself.

I'm a busy business owner and mom and this system is easy to follow and works like a charm!

Here it is:

STEP 1: CULL YOUR PHOTOS ONCE A WEEK

On a regular basis, I go through the last photos I took on my phone in my Photos App. I “heart” the ones I plan to print in my annual photo book.

(On an iPhone, you click on the “heart” below a photo, and it will automatically add that photo to your favorites album.)

I cull my iPhone photos about once a week, but you can find a rhythm that works best for you.

CULL - this might be a new photography word to you. It simply means:

"to select from a large quantity"

Note: your "Favorites" album is located somewhere below the main grid of photos in your iPhone's Photos App:

STEP 2: IMPORT TO LIGHTROOM AND EDIT

Once all my favourited photos are in my "Favorites" album, I import them to Lightroom Mobile to start editing.

Do this by going to your "favorites" album, select all the latest photos, then click on the export icon in the bottom left corner (as circled in red):

Next, in the row of apps, click on the Lightroom app icon.

Note: If the Lightroom app icon does not show up, scroll all the way to the end of the row of apps, click on the three grey dots, and go locate Lightroom.

STEP 3: SAVE YOUR FINAL PHOTOS IN ONE CENTRAL LOCATION

After I'm done editing my photos in Lightroom Mobile, I export them to my Dropbox folder.

I stay organized by saving all my finished, edited photos in Dropbox. It's accessible from all my devices.

Here's how I do it:

In Lightroom, select the photos you just edited. Click on "Share":

Click Export as...

Select JPG, Largest available dimensions and 100% quality.

(This will make your photos large enough to print properly):

For the export destination, I select Dropbox:

I save my photos in a Dropbox folder named "Ready-to-print iPhone Photos".

All year long, I keep adding photos to this album:

By the time January comes, all my final, print-ready photos from the previous year are stored in one place.

I aim to have about 150 to 200 final photos for my annual photo book.

STEP 4: START DESIGNING YOUR PHOTO BOOK

I go to my desktop computer (iMac) to design the photo book layout. I prefer to use a bigger screen.

Next, I go to my favourite photo book printer, PosterJack.ca:

https://posterjack.ca/products/layflat-photo-books?snowball=GABRIELLE68191

(Note: I don’t often share affiliate links, but when I do it’s for products that I love and use often.

Note, again: Some of my friends like using Blurb or Shutterfly, which are other options. However, I prefer the quality of PosterJack - and with their frequent sales, you can't go wrong on price. If you're outside Canada, you can use PosterJack.com)

In PosterJack's photo book designer, I upload my Dropbox photos.

The next step is fun - drag and drop your photos, add captions:

When you’re done, add to cart - and in a few days, the book gets delivered to your door.

It's the best!

A photo book with all of our stories, experiences and highlights from our past year:

INSPIRATION OF THE WEEK: my most cherished possession

I’m the first to admit that I haven’t been great at printing a photo book once a year. Life gets busy, and I put it off, thinking I’ll get to it eventually. Sometimes, I go 2-3 years without printing one. :( This year, I’m committing to getting back on track!

Printing our photos is one of the most important habits we can start. Documenting our life story, preserving it as a physical copy, and storing it within easy reach is valuable beyond measure.

So why have a lot of us stopped printing photo albums in the 2000s?

Digital photography creates an over abundance of photos and culling through the photos is an overwhelming task. We settle with the fact that our photos are backed up online and we can just look at them whenever we want.

But do we?

I don’t!

No one likes sitting at a computer, scrolling through thousands and thousands of unorganized digital photos.

My kids are proof of it.

They never, ever sit at the computer and scroll through hard drives with thousands of old iPhone photos.

Instead, they grab the photo books off the shelf in our living room, sit on the couch, flip through the pages and look back at all our best memories and stories.

This is how we enjoy the stories of our lives: in physical photo books.

For me, my photo books are one of my most cherished possessions.

I hope this e-mail inspires you to get into a new rhythm of printing your photos.

Tell me how it goes!

PHOTO OF THE WEEK: experimenting is greater than perfection

This is a photo I took by shooting through a thin glass panel.

The photo isn’t necessarily a great shot, but it was a fun experiment to shoot through glass.

It teaches me to look beyond common angles and perspectives. Whenever I see glass, I get excited about discovering what happens when I look through it with my camera.

Always being curious and experimenting with my camera is something that has contributed to some of my best creative growth.

This is encouragement to you - to be more curious, to experiment with odd angles and to try new things with your phone.

I promise you will start expanding your creative skills by doing more of this!


RESOURCES YOU MIGHT LIKE: 50% off upcoming workshop!

It's the start of a new year, and I’m offering a 50% off coupon to my e-mail list for my online workshop on January 23rd. Use EMAILLIST50 to book your spot here:

•••


Hi I'm Gabrielle! I run a full time photography business in Winnipeg, specializing in portrait and commercial photography. This newsletter started with my passion for helping everyday people realize their full photography potential. With a bit of technical and creative help, you too can take better photos with the phone camera you already have.

Find more of my free resources:

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Gabrielle Touchette Photography


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Level Up Your Phone Photography

Confident creativity starts with your phone. Simple, powerful ideas to help you grow your phone photography skills, tell visual stories that matter, and unlock your creativity in everyday life. One weekly e-mail at a time.

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