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Posted by Michael Graw on August 21

Use Google Photos to tell stories with your pictures.

Creating a Google Photos album is not only one of the best cloud storage platforms for your photos, but also a great choice to bring your pictures to life.

Google Photos has an integrated print shop where you can combine photos into custom photo albums. You have full control over which photos to include and how to arrange them to tell a visual story. When your photo album is complete, Google will print it for you and ship it to your doorstep.

Printing photo albums is not just a creative way to showcase your latest travel photos. These books can also be used as exquisite deliverables after shooting or exquisite gifts to customers to encourage regular business. Google Photos books are surprisingly cheap and can significantly increase the value of your work in the eyes of customers.

In this guide, we will guide you through the process of creating a Google Photos album in five simple steps.

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In the steps below, we assume that all the images you want to include in the album are in Google Photos and organized into albums. Note that you can crop the image when designing the album, but you must make more substantial edits to things like brightness or color saturation before adding the image to the album.

If you are not familiar with Google Photos, you can use the service to start building a picture library for free. The cloud storage service provides 15 GB of free space. If you upload high-quality images before June 1, 2021, it will not count towards your storage limit.

You can manually upload photos from your desktop or mobile device, or download the Google Photos backup and sync app to manage your uploads. Google will automatically detect faces and objects in your photos and classify them into suggested albums.

Although you can create photo albums through the Google Photos mobile app, it is easier to lay out images on the desktop. Therefore, we will use the Google Photos web interface to illustrate the process.

First, open Google Photos and navigate to the print store, then select the album. Google Photos will recommend some ready-made albums based on your existing albums. If you have put all the images you want to include in one album, just select the album to load all the photos into the book editor.

If you want to create a custom book using the images in the library, click the Make Album button in the upper right corner. Then you can select individual photos to add to the book editor; you can add or delete images at any time later.

Google Photos allows you to choose an image for the album cover. Your photos can take up the entire page, or you can choose a widescreen format and add a title to your book. You can also add text on the spine of the book. Unfortunately, Google Photos does not give you control over the format of the title and spine text.

It’s worth noting that Google Photos cannot allow you to customize the back cover of your album. The back cover will be white with a small Google Photos logo.

When designing a photo album page, you have many options. By default, each photo you choose to include in the album has its own page. You can choose whether to stretch each photo to the entire page or whether it should have a white border around it. Just hover over the image and select one of the layout options displayed on the side of the page.

You can also add multiple photos to the page using multiple pre-made collage layouts. Hover your mouse over the current photo, click the collage icon that appears, and select other photos to include on the page. After adding the image, hover your mouse over the collage and select one of the available layouts.

Google Photos also allows you to add text to any page. Hover your mouse over your page and click the text icon to add a caption to your photo.

You can add more pages to the album at any time using the plus icon at the top of the editor. If you want to delete a page, hover your mouse over the page and click the delete icon in the corner. The right sidebar of the editor displays a preview of your album, so you can see how your images work together to tell a story.

After the album design is complete, click Next. You can choose between a paperback book with 7 inches on each side and a hardcover book with 9 inches on each side.

A paperback photo album with 20 pages of pictures starts at $9.99, and each additional page costs $0.35. The 20-page hardcover album starts at US$19.99, and each additional page is priced at US$0.65.

After selecting your book style, you can view your order, add gift information, select your shipping preferences, and then proceed to checkout. Google uses Google Pay to process payments and accepts most debit and credit cards.

Creating a Google Photos album is a great way to showcase photos, pictures from holidays or events. Professional photographers can also use these photo albums as unique and efficient deliverables for clients.

If you already use Google Photos to store images, the process of making an album is simple. All you have to do is organize your photos into an album, launch the album editor, and arrange your images to reflect the story you want to tell. When finished, Google will print your book and ship it directly to your door.

Michael is a freelance journalist and photographer based in Bellingham, Washington. His interests range from business technology to finance to creative media, focusing on new technologies and emerging trends. Michael's work has been published in TechRadar, Tom's Guide, Business Insider, Fast Company, Salon, and Harvard Business Review.

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